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He thought he could be FDR, but he always better resembled Jimmy Carter.
Say what you might about Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday, the Democrats’ defeat was richly deserved.
Nearly four years ago to the day, Joe Biden became president-elect of the United States in no small part because he offered the American people some semblance of normalcy.
After the Trump years, Biden’s moderate affect had some appeal.
The longtime politico was a familiar face who packaged his policies in relatively benign rhetoric.
When the near-octogenarian who once denounced Roe v. Wade and championed a tough-on-crime bill said that he would govern from the center and unify the country, voters believed him.
Then he stabbed them in the back.
Sold on delusions of grandeur by his allies and overly reliant on his misguided staff, Biden governed as if he was the president of some far-left campus club rather than a diverse country weary of hardcore partisans.
He tried to destroy the livelihoods of Americans who exercised their right not to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
He deliberately opened the border in the name of kindness, while callously ignoring the dire consequences on migrants and citizens alike.
He embraced the most radical elements of social experimenters and cast their opponents as bigots.
He denied inflation’s crushing impact until he couldn’t any longer.
And then when he finally vowed to fix it, he pushed through yet another one of the profligate spending bills that had helped cause the problem in the first place.
He even had the temerity to call it the “Inflation Reduction Act.”
Moreover, while Biden is fond of boasting about his supposedly superior foreign policy experience, he made rookie mistake after rookie mistake as commander-in-chief.
Those mistakes yielded not just a national embarrassment and the loss of American lives in Afghanistan, but chaos across the globe.
Russia invaded Ukraine; Iran and its proxies became more aggressive; a new axis of evil took shape.
Biden might have had experience, but it was, as Trump once put it, “bad experience.”
What’s more, he compounded his disastrous policies with the kind of divisive rhetoric he had promised to banish and soothe.
Georgia’s anodyne election-integrity law should be a model for every other state around the country, but instead of recognizing it as such, Biden made the incendiary — and risible — charge that it was “Jim Crow on steroids.”
Still more shamefully, Biden compared even sensible, civic-minded Republicans like Sens. Susan Collins and Mitt Romney to slavers.
When they opposed his brazen power grab of a federal elections bill, he denounced them as the segregationists of our time.
As it turns out, Biden couldn’t even deliver on his most basic of promises.
And all of that is to say nothing of his selfish decision to stubbornly cling to power well after he was no longer up to the job — or his devious attempt to con the American people into giving his shaky hands four more years at the helm.
For all those reasons and more, the 46th president of the United States turned out to be an unqualified failure.
It might have been Vice President Kamala Harris’ name on the ballot on Tuesday, but it was Biden’s failure that voters were repudiating.
After all, while Harris may be a political mediocrity who happened into both the vice presidency and the Democratic nomination before losing in convincing fashion to Trump, her poor performance was markedly more impressive than what Biden could likely have mustered.
Remember, on the day that Biden finally, mercifully dropped out of the race, he was dead in the water; Harris at least gave the Democrats a fighting chance going into Election Day, even if she ultimately fell well short.
Her campaign may have been based around a subpar candidate and made a series of obvious errors — but those were just the final nails in a coffin that Biden had built for her and for his party.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.