A LOOK BACK OVER THE POLITICAL CAREER OF JOE BIDEN

​Heather Cox Richardson's latest message follows her typically positive assessment about Joe Biden's presidential leadership. 

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-15-2025

I agree that Biden's leadership was a welcome change from the dysfunction of the first Trump administration. His appointment of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court was principled. And Biden's effort to make much-needed improvement to U.S. roads and bridges certainly exceeded anything Trump wanted to do, let alone tried to accomplish, assuming that one believes that Trump tried to do anything about infrastructure during his first term. It is also true that the Biden administration helped restore jobs to many workers that had been outsourced abroad.  

However, Richardson's favorable assessment of Biden's leadership downplays or disregards the harms and longstanding societal wrongs that Biden seemed unwilling, if unable, to address. What follows is not an exhaustive list.

Workers in the United States were not paid a living wage when Biden took office January 20, 2021. They still are not paid a living wage as Biden leaves office. Beyond that, Biden has never supported a federally mandated living wage for working people across the 50 years he has been in public office.

Americans do not have universal health care. Biden has never supported universal health care nor tried to pass legislation mandating universal health care.

Joe Biden continues the tradition of every U.S. president in history of not doing anything to provide reparations to indigenous, Black, Latino, and Asian people for systemic discrimination.

Biden had a majority of both chambers of the U.S. Congress during the first two years of his term. He never tried to enact legislation to legislatively enshrine the protections of Roe v. Wade when he had the opportunity and political leadership that could have done so. The same failing should be assigned to every other U.S. president since Roe v. Wade was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973.

During the Covid pandemic, the Biden administration was inexcusably timid about shielding people from the burden of mortgage and rental costs. Biden seemed more concerned about protecting the investments of lenders than protecting homeowners and renters from being overwhelmed by mortgage bills and rental bills while they were unable to work.

And Joe Biden has been a fierce Zionist his entire political career. As president, Biden enabled the Israeli apartheid regime as that regime displaced Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the Occupied West Bank, destroyed houses, illegally detained Palestinians, and supported illegal Jewish settlements. Biden's support for Israel's genocide in Gaza should not be forgotten or excused.

Biden, like Lyndon Johnson, squandered the chance to make the world more peaceful. I challenge anyone to identify anything Biden has done to help any nation on the African continent aside from using those nations as places to position military personnel, weapons, and other assets. 

And Biden's farewell caution about the threat posed by the oligarchy forces of the uber-wealthy should not be taken at face value. After all, Biden has done the bidding of the military-corporate-incarceration-police and industrial class throughout his political career. I don't put much stock in a warning made by someone who spent his entire political life helping Big Pharma, Wall Street, defense contractors, and other capitalists become what they are. 

Joe Biden's departure from the White House comes at a challenging time for the world. Sadly, much of what he did during his 50 years in public life is being sanitized to burnish his reputation. 

Instead, I recall that he was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and gave Clarence Thomas a pass after Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment. 

I recall that Biden sponsored the 1994 federal law - that Bill Clinton signed - which Michelle Alexander and others correctly say was a major factor in producing the new Jim Crow, mass incarceration. 

And I recall that Biden, like every U.S. President since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, pimped King's reputation as a moral leader for human rights and peace, but Biden refused to embrace King's call for a "radical revolution of values" away from racism, militarism, and capitalism.

In some ways, Joe Biden reminds me of Lyndon Johnson. Like Johnson, Biden became president when the nation and world faced tremendous challenges. Like Johnson, Biden squandered time, national wealth, and his power trying to prop up capitalism, militarism, and being timid about dismantling institutional and structural racism, sexism, imperialism, techno-centrism, and xenophobia. 

And like Heather Cox Richardson, Joe Biden's political and cultural ideology is blind to the impact of those forces on people of color in this society and in the nations of the global South for the past half century. 

In that sense, it might be better to liken Biden to Rip Van Winkle, the character who slept through the Revolutionary War and the founding years of the United States, but with one important distinction. In Washington Irving's book, Rip Van Winkle slept for 20 years through a revolutionary time. 

But Joe Biden was sleepwalking for the past 50 years - more than twice as long - as police violence against unarmed people increased exponentially in the United States. 

Biden was sleepwalking for the past 50 years as income and wealth inequality widened. 

Biden was sleepwalking for the past 50 years as healthcare costs rose, yet healthcare is less accessible and more expensive than ever. 

Biden was sleepwalking for the past 50 years as Palestinians have been massacred, defrauded, driven from their homes, neighborhoods, farms, and invaded by successive Israeli administrations with U.S. funding, diplomatic cover, weapons, and religious and political encouragement and sponsorship. 

Biden was sleepwalking for the past 50 years while Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands - with populations larger than the states of Vermont and Wyoming - have been denied statehood.   

The last sermon Sunday morning Dr. King preached, titled Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, was delivered at the National Cathedral (Episcopal) in Washington, D.C. on March 31, 1968. During that sermon, Dr. King uttered the following statement.

The judgment of God is upon us today, and we could go right down the line and see that something must be done ... and something must be done quickly. We have alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world. 

As Joe Biden leaves the White House, Dr. King's words should haunt him and the rest of us. I add the following comment to what King said. During the years Biden has been in public office, the United States has not only "alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world." We have at the same time alienated ourselves from one another.    

The sad truth which Heather Cox Richardson and other commentators fail to recognize or admit is that Americans have been sleepwalking - with Biden and his presidential predecessors - since Dr. King spoke those words. This is one reason why Americans will be tormented by the second presidency of Donald Trump, a convicted felon and vicious idiot. 

This is a foreseeable danger that occurs when sleepwalking people choose sleepwalking leaders.