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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
If the essence of Greek tragedy is that the hero is undone by his flaws, Joe Biden gets star billing. He defeated Donald Trump, stood up to Russia, enacted more reforms than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and delivered a strong economy. This has made Biden a hero on the American left and beyond. Yet most of his achievements will now be erased. His legacy is the return of Trump. Deluge after Biden. He himself is mainly responsible.
The flaw of the Greek tragic hero is hubris. Biden last week said He could have won the 2024 elections if he had stayed in the race. This fact was notwithstanding Only 27 percent of Americans Last June thought he had the cognitive ability to run for president again. Perhaps Trump would have won a bigger victory. Regardless of Kamala Harris’ fault, her vote came within 1.5 percentage points of Trump’s.
Not much is yet known about the conspiracy of silence surrounding Biden’s waning power. Although he was shielded from press conferences and other unrecorded events, it was an open secret in Washington that his mind was read. Biden’s family’s inner cabinet and longtime allies should take some of the blame. It was also a failure of the media. The rare journalist who blew the whistle risked access to liberal social media and exclusionary harm.
But Buck stops with Biden. If he redeems his vow to be a one-term “bridge” into the post-Trump era, the Democratic Party would have had time to find a stronger candidate than Harris — someone who could distance himself from what was unpopular with Biden about the economy. Instead, Biden, isolated from public sentiment, was isolated. To be sure, Harris’ biggest swings in November came from voters who paid the most attention to the news. Trump, meanwhile, won the low-information polls by huge margins, regardless of race, income and gender. All right-wing Americans are with you, one supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the twice-losing Democratic nominee of the 1950s. Yes, but I need a majority, he quipped.
No one said politics is fair. Biden helped ensure the post-Covid US rebound was stronger than any other major economy. But a nostalgic nation associates Trump with the pre-Covid era. People blamed Biden for inflation — and his stimulus helped fuel it. But voters didn’t give him any credit for the rest. A clear majority of Americans polled by Gallup this week said the U.S. has lost ground in six areas during Biden’s tenure. These were the economy, the federal debt, immigration, income inequality, America’s position in the world, and crime.
In only one area did the majority say progress had been made during Biden’s presidency – “the situation of gay, lesbian and transgender people”. No data better captures the narrative and leadership weaknesses of the Biden administration. Until he dropped out in July, Biden doubled down on Trump’s threat to democracy, even though his team had known for months that democracy was not among the top five voters’ concerns.
But it’s the nobility of the flawed hero that gives Biden a Greek ending. Both virtue and nobility were present in his personal tragedy. When Biden was vice-president, his net worth was estimated About half a million dollars. After nearly half a century in public life, it was barely a rounding error. No informed American thinks Biden was corrupt. But he turned a blind eye to his son Hunter, who wanted to monetize the family name despite falling into addiction. Biden paid a heavy price for that indulgence. Like Othello, Biden loved not wisely but too well.
Ukrainians will remember Biden fondly. The same cannot be said for the Palestinians. Amid the rubble of the worst civilian death toll in years, the Gaza Strip is littered with US munitions supplied by Biden. He believes he acted nobly to prevent further toll and stop wars in the Middle East. By bottling up Vladimir Putin’s military assets in Ukraine, Biden could also play a role in the downfall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. But much of the global South sees Biden as someone who has failed to live up to the values he promised. That Trump is seen in many parts of the world as a different version of Biden — not as a radical departure — may be the hardest judgment of all.
Biden promised four years ago to be “an ally of light, not darkness.” He meant it. In Biden’s farewell address to the nation on Wednesday night, only he will know what it feels like to give up the stage to Trump.
