Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, summarized the political career of Benjamin Disraeli, Britain’s great 19th century Conservative prime minister, as “failure, failure, failure, partial success, renewed failure, ultimate and complete triumph.”
There is something in this sequence that parallels President Joe Biden’s half-century in politics, although in his case ultimate and complete triumph applies only to securing the presidency, not to his policies, leadership qualities, or the substantive and moral consequences of his occupancy of that office.
Biden ran ignominiously badly for president in 1988 and 2008 before winning on his third try in 2020.
In 1988, he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where his track record included the traducing of Judge Robert Bork in a low and unseemly oversight performance that endeared him somewhat to the Left. But this won him scant support in the presidential primary, and his campaign collapsed in disgrace after Biden was exposed as a serial plagiarist on a scale so grand that by today’s standards he could be president of an Ivy League university.
He returned to the Senate and bided another 20 years before running again in 2008. But, just as happened two decades earlier, he achieved nothing more than the status of an also-ran, this time behind Hillary Clinton and the eventual nominee, Barack Obama. There are successful second acts in American politics, but Biden’s was little different than his first. Defeat followed defeat.
Then, however, came partial success. Obama, whom Biden had sought clumsily to compliment as “the first African American who [was] articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” plucked Joe from deepening obscurity and chose him as his vice presidential running mate. From defeat, Biden snatched the consolation of sidekick success.
Then came 2020, and once again Biden appeared to be heading for calamitous failure, placing fourth in the Iowa caucuses and fifth in the New Hampshire primary. But suddenly — boom! — he was rescued. Indeed, he was handed victory in South Carolina by Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), whose endorsement brought with it the state’s black vote. Other candidates threw in the towel, and the superannuated onetime no-hoper cruised to the Oval Office, where he now sits hoping for a second term.
Lord Randolph Churchill might therefore have summed up Biden’s career as “failure, failure, partial success, incipient failure, ultimate victory.”
There, however, the parallel with Disraeli ends. The British statesman was a leader who made things happen and shaped politics. They didn’t just take place while he happened to be there, more or less coincidentally, at the top of what he referred to as the “greasy pole.” Disraeli overhauled his party and created modern conservatism. He was a populist who built a middle-class movement, patriotic sometimes jingoistic in character, that had little in common with the landed-gentry Tory party from which it grew.
Biden, by contrast, is neither leading nor reshaping his party. It is changing, for sure, but is doing so not because he is directing it but because he has little influence over what is happening to it. He is prepared to let others decide where it goes, as long as he is allowed to stay at the top of the greasy pole.
During his presidency, the Democratic Left has become a radical battering ram smashing down successive sets of protective doors behind which the norms, traditions, and decencies of our rule-of-law, liberal democratic culture lie vulnerable.
Biden did not fulfill his 2020 promise to be a centrist bulwark against the excesses of such colleagues as Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) (how tame those two look today compared to the militants with whom leading Democrats fawningly express solidarity). Instead, before even arriving in office, Biden abandoned the schtick of a staunch centrist that he’d peddled to voters.
Having duped the country into believing he would restore order and decency after former President Donald Trump’s four chaotic years, he has made little effort to prevent the Democrats from subsiding into an unprincipled and intellectually incoherent agglomeration of, to borrow a phrase, “deplorables.”
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That is not to say his presence has made no difference. It has been important in a negative sense. By being ineffectual, by going along with whatever has been proposed to him by the Obama holdovers and new radicals who staff his administration, by being an empty suit, our president has facilitated chaos at home and squandered American authority abroad.
For him, the only thing that has ever mattered was getting to the top of the greasy pole. What good he might do once he reaches the top is not a matter he appears to have considered deeply or about which he seems greatly to care.
