By
David Ignatius
July 21, 2024 at 2:03 p.m. EDT
President Biden has always had trouble letting go, even if it was something as simple as a handshake in a receiving line. He might be tired and stressed at the end of a workday, but he would clasp each guest’s palm, maybe a pat on the back, too, or a hug, reminiscing and cajoling as the minutes ticked by and the line backed up.
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Biden seemed to love all his jobs in government, especially this last one. The whole world was waiting in line to shake his hand. He could be irascible and demanding with his staff, but in his public role as president he was nearly always the genial patriarch. After a lifetime of being underestimated, he liked being in charge. And it was hard to give that up.
The country has watched Biden’s agonizing path toward Sunday’s announcement that he won’t run for a second term. By the end, he seemed nearly alone in resisting this decision.
Three-quarters of the country told pollsters a year ago that he was too old to serve another term as president. But perhaps Biden saw that long receiving line stretching toward the horizon, and he didn’t want to step away.
Biden’s decision will allow a relieved country to applaud his success as president. Much of the Republican critique of Biden is pure nonsense. In fact, he helped steward sustained economic growth. He made critical investments in technology and infrastructure. He rebuilt America’s foreign alliances. And he was steadfast in the great moral challenge of our time, which was resistance to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dark designs on Ukraine and the world.
It’s often said that if we could see ourselves through others’ eyes, we would make better decisions about our weaknesses. But Biden for many months resisted recognizing what television viewers could plainly see: that he was aging and increasingly unsteady in ways that made another term as commander in chief problematic.
Simply raising the question drew the wrath of Biden and his inner circle, as I discovered when I wrote a column in September
arguing that despite my admiration for him and his policies, he shouldn’t run for reelection.
In Biden-world, retirement was unmentionable, and his team quickly closed off any real discussion last year of his age and fitness for office. It wasn’t the best moment for his party, or for some members of the news media, who were so focused on the threat they saw in former president
Donald Trump that they deflected any real discussion of Biden’s weaknesses.
Why was Biden so resistant? Part of it surely was the pride and vanity everyone feels as they age. Older people don’t want to give up the keys to their cars even as they become a danger to others. They insist they can do everything as well as they could decades earlier, even when they can’t. It’s human to resist the signs of aging. I’m 74 myself, and I am deep into denial.
But it’s different when you’re commander in chief. You can’t talk about getting to bed earlier when you’re the person who could receive the ominous phone call at 2 a.m. warning that an adversary has launched a missile strike. “I just got to pace myself a little more, pace myself,”
Biden said in a July 11 news conference. That’s good advice for most people, but if you hold the fate of the world in your hands, it’s not enough. Covering over your infirmities can be an act of recklessness.
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Biden’s stubbornness has in some ways been one of his superpowers. He was the guy who was always undervalued. Others might be sharper debaters or more innovative thinkers, but Biden stayed in the fight, through personal tragedies and political reversals. That bred a self-confidence that could be downright ornery at times. One of Biden’s close advisers likened the Biden White House to a sentimental but sometimes dysfunctional Irish family. You did not want to make the boss angry.
The public Biden conveyed the common sense of a normal person. He was the guy from Scranton, Pa., who had grown up in the middle of the middle. He prized the “regular order” of the Senate. After spending more than half his life as a legislator, he knew how to compromise. He was the scrappy come-from-behind guy. People didn’t think he could win the White House in 2020 or be a good president. But he proved them wrong, twice over, and that reinforced his belief in his own judgment and resistance to others.
Biden’s mission, as he so often said, was to defeat Trump, who he thought was genuinely dangerous to the country. If Trump hadn’t cruised toward the nomination, Biden might have stepped back months ago, one of his close friends told me. Biden truly felt an obligation to halt the MAGA menace again, as he had in the 2020 presidential race and the 2022 midterm elections.
“I think I’m the most qualified person to run for president. I beat him once, and I will beat him again,” he said at that July 11 news conference. “I got more work to do. We’ve got more work to finish.” Really, it was as simple as that.
I hope Biden will preside over a competitive race to choose a successor, rather than anoint Vice President Harris. She will be a better candidate and potential president if she goes through a tumultuous one-month barnstorming campaign that should energize the Democrats and the country.
When President Lyndon B. Johnson stepped back from reelection in March 1968, he had
a kind of rebirth. Doris Kearns Goodwin writes in
a new book that “the lame duck rose like a phoenix from the ashes.” Johnson’s poll ratings reversed from 57 percent disapproval to 57 percent approval. An editorial in the Washington Post said he had made “a personal sacrifice in the name of national unity that entitles him to a very special place in the annals of American history.”
A similar wave of public admiration should follow Biden’s decision. He did the right things as president for America and the world, even when it hurt. He put the country back together after a bruising Trump presidency. And in the end, he understood it was time to go.
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