To friends and advisors, President Joe Biden regularly compared his presidency to Franklin D. Roosevelt's. Both men took office during a global economic crisis and soaring national unemployment. Both passed major spending bills to put money in people's pockets and literally rebuild the country. Both faced down fascist threats. And like FDR, Biden wanted his presidential legacy to be that of a transformative figure, lifting America out of the depths of COVID-19 and Trumpism toward a new era of prosperity. Instead, Biden's presidency will be remembered, to the extent it is at all, as a bump in the road of the Trump Era.
One-term presidents generally don't crack many top 10 lists of most influential political leaders. George H.W. Bush's four years is largely forgettable sandwiched in between the far more societally transformative Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton years.
Biden could face an even worse fate, because by the time Trump leaves office in 2029, he will have been the dominant focal point of American political life for over 12 years. Even when Trump wasn't in office, he monopolized our attention. With the fallout after Jan. 6, the FBI raid of his Mar-a-Lago estate, his multiple criminal investigations, his civil fraud and sexual assault trials, his 34 felony convictions, and his eventual return to the campaign stage as the unified leader of a MAGA-fied Republican Party, Trump's notoriety often drowned out anything Biden did from the Oval Office. Ironically, by losing the election in 2020, and being forced to serve nonconsecutive terms, the Trump Era has an extended shelf life beyond even the most influential two-term presidents. In comparison, Biden will be all but forgotten.
It didn't have to be this way.
Biden won the 2020 Democratic nomination on a promise to return the country to normalcy, decency, even boringness. His bland, folksy, middle-of-the-road approach was exactly what we needed at a time when a deadly pandemic ripped through the world while Trump mused about injecting bleach to disinfect our veins. And given grave concerns over Biden's age, democratic voters demanded and Biden all but promised to serve as a one-term standard bearer, a transitional figure to, in his own words, serve "as a bridge, not as anything else. There's an entire generation of [Democratic] leaders" who are "the future of this country." Given the historic public health crisis and presidential chaos of 2020, punctuated by the Jan. 6 attempt to violently overthrow an election, Biden's steady hand as a transitional figure to wipe away COVID-19 and Trump would itself have been transformative. History might have viewed him as among the most consequential one-term presidents as a result.
This very well could have been Biden's legacy. Had he kept his implied promise not to seek reelection, a true robust democratic primary could have played out among a dozen or more promising candidates. The number of possible nominees from governor's mansions, the Senate chambers, and within the Biden administration would have ensured a rough and tumble primary season. But that's a good thing. Democrats succeed when candidates have time to introduce themselves to the country, refine their arguments in debates, and respond to voters during the primary season. Barack Obama and Biden himself were beneficiaries of such primaries. When Democrats coronate a standard bearer, as with Hillary Clinton in 2016, or Kamala Harris in 2024, they remain more distant from the pulse of voters they need to win over.
Perhaps it wouldn't have mattered. Incumbent parties in inflationary economies tend not to fare well. But a democratic nominee not named Biden or Harris could have more deftly avoided the incumbent label and perhaps better exploited Trump's continued historic unfavorability ratings. As it stands, Biden's stubborn insistence on seeking a second term to solidify his FDR-like legacy in the face of dreadful internal polling numbers, and refusal to step aside until the eleventh hour, all but doomed his party's chances in 2024 and doomed all of us to four years of unrestrained Trump. And as a result, he likely doomed his legacy as well.
Shawn Fields is a law professor at California Western School of Law in San Diego, California. Professor Fields joined the California Western School of Law faculty in 2023 as an associate professor of law, where he teaches civil procedure, criminal procedure, criminal law, and a research seminar on police practices and reform.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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