Former President Joe Biden and his wife are back in the public eye thanks to Jill Biden’s new book and Joe’s apparent difficulties raising money for his presidential library. Hunter Biden, meanwhile, has become a social media personality and even a guest on Candace Owens’s podcast. It’s a reminder that as much as the entire left-of-center community may want to simply memory-hole the entire Biden era, the family did serve for four years and their legacy matters.
At the same time, my strong sense is that among Democratic Party elites, a superficial consensus around being annoyed at Joe and Jill is masking deeper disagreements about what, exactly, they did wrong.
Jerusalem and I decided it might be fun to try to put together our rankings of the Bidens’ mistakes.
I don’t want to spoil the actual list — you’ll have to listen to the pod for that — but personally I take the somewhat contrarian view that the decision to run for a second term and then drop out too late to avoid an open primary was fine. It was maybe good, even. I’m also a defender of Biden’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict. This obviously was not perfect. Like every other president in history, he did not successfully resolve the conflict and generate a just and peaceful outcome. But the rapidly congealed conventional wisdom on the left that he was complicit in a genocide is, I think, both factually wrong and also a kind of cope — a way for progressives to sharply distance themselves from his administration without grappling with its substantive failures on domestic policy.
Jerusalem is less kind to Biden on those two points, but correspondingly kinder on some others. All told, I think this is the kind of conversation that Democrats really need to be having about the past administration — almost everyone these days agrees that the party needs to change and offer something different, but what exactly is that going to mean?
As for future episodes, in a couple of weeks we’ll be reviewing Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” so grab a copy and read along!
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