OPINION:
If there is one thing the Biden family is exceptionally good at these days, it is misreading the room.
Right now, there is a full-court press underway to salvage Joe Biden’s political legacy. It is a desperate, multifront public relations offensive designed to remind us that he is a conquering hero, not just the guy who fumbled the ball so catastrophically that Donald Trump is back in the White House.
But not everyone is buying the spin. As Tommy Vietor, former Obama spokesman and “Pod Save America” co-host, so perfectly crystallized the prevailing mood among exhausted Democrats: “Joe Biden is only a victim of what others did to him. He never views the country as the victim of what he did to us.”
Ouch. But also, spot on.
A New York Magazine piece last week paints a remarkably bleak, yet tragically comedic, picture of this redemption tour. In early June, the 83-year-old former president found himself standing at a lectern inside a Best Western in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He was there to address a crowd of 1,200 Democrats who were aggressively munching on iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing.
He assured the crowd he had to leave early for a goddaughter’s wedding — “So when I run off the stage, it’s not because I’m afraid to hear the response,” he joked. He then delivered a speech characterized by soft mumbling punctuated by sudden, inexplicable bursts of yelling, along with his trademark: losing his train of thought and just trailing off into silence.
The entire Sioux Falls spectacle was just one stop on a broader, aggressive campaign by the Biden inner circle to assert that time is healing all wounds. Rufus Gifford, a former campaign finance chairman, insists that “without a doubt, every day, there is less of a ’24 hangover.”
But if you ask the actual campaign staffers who had to live through the wreckage, the hangover is a raging, incurable migraine. One former staffer laid it out plainly to the magazine: “I think it is very hard to ever get over the fact that he is responsible for the hellscape that we live in now. It is undeniable that his hubris cost us. He was an extremely impactful president who was successful in delivering tangible wins for Americans, but all of that is washed away.”
And if Joe’s lingering hubris wasn’t enough to torpedo the legacy-salvaging mission, Jill Biden has swooped in to ensure everything is completely messed up.
The former first lady recently released a memoir titled “View From the East Wing,” which has served less as a reflection on her time in the White House and more as a spectacular master class in rewriting history. Jill has been touring the country telling interviewers that her husband absolutely would have beaten Mr. Trump if the pesky Democratic establishment hadn’t pushed him out.
But in her book, she casually drops the bombshell that during the disastrous 2024 debate, she wondered if her husband had suffered a stroke or was drugged. Yet, at the time, she said nothing, acting as his fiercest defender and letting him march into a Waffle House for a photo op.
The defense of her own nonintervention is particularly rich. On the biggest decisions — whether her husband should run again, whether he should drop out — she claims she stayed out of it. The fierce “mama bear” who once punched a bully for picking on her sister apparently went completely passive when the stakes were the actual presidency. Convenient.
Not to be left out of the family’s media blitz, Hunter Biden has completely rebranded himself as an internet troll. Reentering the chat on X, Hunter has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers by posting about his sobriety and picking fights with journalists.
He has gone after CNN’s Jake Tapper — comparing him to the dim-witted “Anchorman” character Brick Tamland — for daring to criticize his mother, while hypocritically pointing fingers at the Trump family’s business dealings.
The Bidens are desperately trying to force the public to look at them, hoping we will suddenly see a legacy of triumph instead of a cautionary tale of stubbornness. But as former President Obama’s longtime campaign guru David Axelrod so astutely pointed out, dragging Mr. Biden back into the limelight is a spectacularly bad strategy.
“Putting him front and center will remind people why he was forced to leave the stage,” he said.
There it is. The fundamental flaw in the entire enterprise: The best argument against the Biden legacy tour is the Bidens themselves. Every shaky speech, every lost thread, every chapter of Jill’s memoir doesn’t rehabilitate the legacy — it explains it.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.”
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on X @josephcurl.
Follow the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.