Americans don’t agree on much these days but no matter the election results, one outcome is certain: There will be no mourning over the end of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Democrats, maybe even more than Republicans, will be delighted to see him go.
Perhaps a bipartisan chorus in Washington will break out into song with the words, “Hit the road, Joe, and don’t come back no more.”
Biden’s single term was so disastrous, both at home and abroad, that his party made history by forcing him off the ticket months after he’d won the nomination, a move that sparked universal relief among the faithful, including big donors.
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Party leaders tried to put a smiley face on the brutal putsch with orchestrated chants of “Thank you, Joe” at the August convention, but the harder job was hiding a sitting president from the public.
There was little choice lest his mumbles and stumbles remind voters that his replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, was part of the conspiracy to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline from voters.
DC’s rot made manifest
But like a bad penny, he kept surfacing and his most recent appearances were a national embarrassment. When last seen, the man who took office promising to unite America was calling the millions of Donald Trump supporters “garbage.”
Then he lied about it and aides changed the White House transcript to cover up the truth.
Recall, too, that just days before Trump was wounded in a summer assassination attempt, Biden had said that it was “time to put Trump in a bull’s-eye.”
The cynical recklessness was a feature of his misbegotten tenure.
He had his attorney general break 200 years of precedence by indicting the former president, all while the Justice Department slow-walked clear evidence of criminality against Biden’s son and shielded the president himself from scrutiny about his family’s influence-peddling scheme.
The man who throughout his career worshiped at the altar of political norms and traditions ended by trashing them in a bid to lock up his rival and retain power.
All while calling Trump a threat to democracy.
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In big ways, Joe Biden represents everything wrong with Washington.
He spent more than 50 years there and became a caricature of a back-slapping shape-shifter, bombastically supporting whatever position was the fad of the moment.
He somehow got rich and was a Walter Mitty-level fabulist whose first run for president, in 1988, crashed when he was caught plagiarizing a speech by a British politician about his own life.
Later it emerged Biden had also lied about his law school rank and falsely claimed to have received three college degrees.
Still, with his life marked by tragedy — his first wife and daughter died in a car crash and older son Beau died of cancer — Biden often cut a sympathetic figure.
His grief was never far from the surface, and he was known to offer comfort to others suffering loss.
Yet contradictions abound, with his Senate career greased by the southern Dixiecrats who had fought desegregation, and he famously eulogized Sen. Robert Byrd, a former member of the KKK.
In those days, Biden ardently defended the Senate filibuster rule as a crucial guard against one-party legislation.
As president, he wanted it removed, calling it a “relic of the Jim Crow era.”
‘High-tech lynching’
As a senator, he had called urban schools “jungles.”
As president, he said America was mostly racist.
When Georgia proposed an ID requirement on voters similar to the one in his home state of Delaware, Biden called it “Jim Crow 2.0.”
He became a household name as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the 1991 confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.
Biden, who voted against Thomas, managed to turn the process into an ugly racial circus that smeared the reputations of both Thomas and Anita Hill, the main witness against him.
Thomas, who has established himself as a brilliant Associate Justice, infamously described the hearings as a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.”
Biden was also head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and fancied himself an astute figure in world affairs.
Robert Gates, a former defense secretary, strongly disagreed.
“I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” Gates wrote in his autobiography.
That was a decade ago, and Biden’s two terms as vice president and four years in the Oval Office prove he has been consistently wrong for five decades.
Because Democrats and their media shills protected him, the public still doesn’t know the extent of his role in the family scheme, but the Praetorian Guard could not protect him from the consequences of his failed policies.
His spending ignited the worst inflation in decades and he opened the southern border with executive orders mostly to show his contempt for Trump, who had successfully tightened access.
The millions upon millions of unvetted migrants who have poured in from all over the world under Biden and Harris will be a problem that will last for a generation at least.
Biden’s foreign policy was similarly reckless.
His abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan will be remembered as a defining event that signaled American weakness, and our adversaries have pounced.
Iran, Russia and China are on the march, and our allies, especially Israel and Ukraine, are suffering the deadly results.
Biden’s foolish faith in appeasement, especially toward Iran, has moved the world closer to global conflict.
Predictably, his bid to woo antisemitic Dems while keeping faith with Israel has pleased nobody — and created vast uncertainty about America’s role.
A great relief for US
His selection of Harris as a running mate four years ago was in keeping with his politics-of-the-moment approach.
Desperate to retain the Obama coalition, he let it be known he would pick a black female and described himself as a transition figure.
His connection to the Deep State was also crucial to his 2020 victory.
The false claim by 51 former intelligence officials that son Hunter’s laptop smacked of Russian disinformation likely saved him from defeat — even though the FBI had already confirmed the laptop belonged to Hunter and its explosive contents were valid.
It is fitting then that one of Biden’s final acts as president will almost certainly be to issue a pardon to Hunter for his federal gun and tax crimes.
He denied he will do it, but that was when he was a candidate.
Now that he’s a lame duck and voters have spoken, he can finally be honest and do what any father would do.
In that sense, his return to private life will be a great relief for him — and for the rest of America as well.