What is the salient feature of Joe Biden as president? If you had to choose one standout characteristic, the signature, the leitmotif of the man in the Oval Office, what would it be?
Incompetence and failure immediately raise their hands to seize the garland. They can indeed make vigorous claims for the dubious honor. Biden has, without doubt, littered the political landscape with his cack-handed failures.
He has made a dog’s breakfast of immigration policy and erased the southern border to welcome 2 million illegal immigrants. And still they keep coming.
He has scuttled out of Afghanistan, humiliating America in the eyes of the world, and handed over the long-suffering Afghan people to the brutal mercies of a few lightly armed peasant farmers, whom he gifted billions of dollars’ worth of heavier equipment with which to terrorize their compatriots.
He has stoked inflation, partly with spending (both actual and proposed) in a passable impersonation of an inebriated seaman and partly by loading up regulations on the cracking backs of businesses trying to recover from the pandemic shutdown.
And he has failed entirely to return the country to any semblance of its pre-pandemic norms.
It is an impressive list. But incompetence and failure must be denied the laurels, for although Biden has proved himself a virtuoso in these lamentable skills, he is not alone in being their master. If he were, he would not so often be compared with the hapless President Jimmy Carter. Failure, incompetence, retreat, and defeat are not Biden’s alone.
What makes our current president unique is, surely, that his unbroken record policy implosions have been accompanied at all points by boasting. Jimmy Carter, for all his dismal cardigan-wrapped malaise, could not be accused of being a shallow braggart. Surely no president other than the one we have now has ever so overpromised while so underdelivering. The combination is deadly — and deadly excruciating.
It is not just that Biden shamefully ran away from Afghanistan, abandoning Americans and our allies there — it’s that just a couple of months earlier, he airily declared that such an outcome was “highly unlikely.”
It is not just that he is filching purchasing power from everyone’s pockets with inflation month after month — it’s heading for double figures — it’s that he promised the price squeeze would be “temporary.” Now, it is expected to continue throughout this year, at least.
It’s not just that he has presided over as many COVID-19 deaths as his predecessor, despite being bequeathed several effective vaccines — it’s that he repeatedly said, in speeches, in debates, and on social media, “I’m going to shut down the virus, not the country.”
It is a stunningly consistent record of empty and swiftly demolished claims. But we should not be surprised. The gulf between Biden’s claims and achievements has been exposed again and again though five decades in political life. He has always been an empty suit, or rather a suit filled to overflowing with hot air. His unvarying modus operandi is all about making himself look better than he is, less like a hack pol who on his early presidential runs mustered so little support that his percentages would have been a rounding error for more impressive candidates.
His desperate need for acclaim, to be seen as more admired than his skills can command, was evident all along, there from the beginning. It’s why he plagiarized a paper at law school to pretend he was something he wasn’t.
It is why he plagiarized a campaign speech originally delivered by Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labor Party, to burnish a record and tug at heartstrings he could not pluck legitimately.
It is why he boasted on the campaign trail that he was in the top half of his law school class when in truth he placed 76th out of 85, did not get three university degrees, and was not awarded a full scholarship.
Biden is a congenital and habitual boaster, an empty vessel making a lot of noise, all of it resonant of hollow falsehood. Deep inside that echoing void, he knows he’s less than he needs to be to be where he is. His political survival instinct has produced half a century of embarrassing embellishment. He is a man who has, as Kitty Muggeridge once said of President Richard Nixon’s interviewer, David Frost, “risen without a trace.”
And even while he has convinced nobody else of his wonderfulness, Biden has convinced himself. He has allowed himself to believe he can be as bold and consequential as FDR or LBJ despite lacking their majorities.
He was, however, chosen as America’s president not for who he is but for who he was not. First he was not Sen. Bernie Sanders, so Democrats accepted him as their nominee. Then he was not Donald Trump, so the country seized upon him as their alternative president.
The signature characteristic of Biden is hubris. Sadly for the country, hubris is traditionally stalked by nemesis.
