Joe Biden: America’s man of the middle steps down

In the end, it was his age that prevented Joe Biden from running for President again. On July 21, the US President announced he would not seek re-election in November. Biden will see out the rest of his term in office, but the Democrats will look for a new presidential candidate at their convention in August.

Calls from his allies in the Democratic Party and the US media for the president to withdraw his candidacy had been getting louder since his disastrous performance in a TV debate against Donald Trump in June. Biden’s frail appearance and his many bungled, confused answers had fuelled concerns that, at 81, the President was too old for the job.

While he maintained for months that he had every intention of running again, he eventually withdrew from the race on July 21. It marks the twilight of an illustrious political career, which Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. began at 30 as one of the youngest Senators in US history. When he entered the White House in 2021 at 78, he was the oldest US President ever to be inaugurated.

Tested by tragedy

Biden grew up in modest conditions. Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born on November 20, 1942, had once been a prosperous mining hub but was suffering by the 1950s. After a brief career in law, he decided to challenge Delaware’s long-standing Republican Senator in 1972. Despite having little money and few apparent chances—family members filled many campaign staff roles—Biden won the November election at the age of 30, making him the sixth-youngest Senator in US history.

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“My own father always said the measure of a man wasn’t how many times or how hard he got knocked down, but how fast he got back up,” Biden once said. This philosophy would be put to the test more than once in his life. A few weeks after Biden won his Senate election, his wife, Neilia, and their 1-year-old daughter Naomi died in a car crash that also left their sons Beau and Hunter badly injured.

Though Biden initially wanted to resign, he was persuaded to take office. On January 3, 1973, he was sworn in at the hospital where his sons were being treated. He started to commute between Wilmington and Washington, DC. His sister Valerie moved into his home to help with the children and stayed until 1977, when Biden married Jill Jacobs, with whom he had a daughter, Ashley.

Obama and Biden: A good team

During his six terms as Delaware Senator, Biden earned a reputation for seeking bipartisan support for his legislative plans. When he later became US President Barack Obama’s Vice President, he was seen to be an intermediary to middle America.

Biden had twice tried for the Democratic presidential nomination before he finally got it. In 1988, he ended his campaign after being accused of plagiarising a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. In 2008, he failed to gain traction in primaries against Obama and Hillary Clinton. When he became Vice President, however, he was instrumental in the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which many consider Obama’s greatest legacy.

Against this backdrop, it was a particularly tragic twist of fate that next befell his family. While he was fighting for healthcare for low-income families, his oldest son, Beau, died of a brain tumour. “To know Joe Biden is to know love without pretense, service without self-regard, and to live life fully,” Obama said in 2017, when he awarded Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Running against Trump

“Maybe the most important thing my mom and dad taught me was that everyone should be treated with dignity,” he said after announcing that he would run for President in 2020 against President Donald Trump. “Today too many middle-class and working-class people, they’re not able to look their kid in the eye and say, ‘Honey, it’s going to be okay,’ and mean it. That’s why I’m running.”

It is because he was considered a “man of the middle” that many Democrats thought he could bring together a wide coalition of voters to defeat Trump, who was and remains an incredibly divisive figure among the American public. The fact that Biden had Obama’s backing also drew support from many Black voters, which helped him towards victory in an election which saw the highest turnout in more than a century.

Tackling the coronavirus pandemic and ailing infrastructure

By the time his administration declared the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency in May 2023, more than 1.1 million Americans had died of the disease, the majority since Biden took office in 2021. During his 2020 election campaign, he had promised he would listen to medical experts more than his predecessor Donald Trump.

Biden extended lockdown measures and presided over a broad distribution of vaccines and a $1.9 trillion (€1.6 trillion) economic relief package. Under his presidency, the number of Americans without health insurance fell by nearly 6 million compared to before the pandemic. Yet critics still called Biden’s lockdown measures too strict, and said they hurt US businesses.

Policies that brought Biden acclaim included lowering prices for prescription medications and passing a bipartisan infrastructure law to repair many of the US’ ailing roads and bridges. Under Biden’s presidency, the US has experienced record job growth of the kind it had not seen since the 1960s. But in the summer of 2022, the US saw inflation of 9.1 per cent, a four-decade high.

The cost of living, including things like fuel and grocery prices, rose considerably, hurting low-income families especially. While some factors behind this were beyond Biden’s control, like the war in Ukraine causing supply-chain problems, critics said increased federal spending under Biden, including $750 million on climate change and tax breaks, exacerbated the problem.

Family controversy

Controversy around the career of his son Hunter followed Biden throughout his presidency. Hunter Biden had worked on the board of a Ukrainian energy company while his father served as Vice President in Barack Obama’s administration, leading to accusations of corruption and misconduct.

In 2023, the House of Representatives opened an impeachment inquiry into whether Joe Biden had ever acted in a corrupt way in relation to his son’s business dealings. By spring 2024, the campaign had petered out, with observers saying the Republicans would not be able to gather enough votes to impeach Biden. Hunter Biden was indicted on tax evasion charges in 2023, and on three felony charges regarding lies he told about drug use on a gun purchase form in 2024. He has denied any other wrongdoing.

The Israel conundrum

Some of the most vociferous criticism Biden has faced from his left flank was over US support for Israel in the conflict following the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023.

As Israel’s troops launched massive attacks in Gaza in response, Biden emphasised his country’s strong alliance with Israel and sent financial and military aid. Historically, the US has always been a partner of Israel. But as Israeli airstrikes killed more and more civilians in Gaza—the current death toll tops 39,000—and the humanitarian situation there became catastrophic, many in the US, especially young voters, were appalled that their tax dollars were being used to fund Israel’s military.

Biden has issued several ultimatums to Israel about its conduct, first demanding that it increase the amount of humanitarian aid entering Gaza after Israel killed several World Central Kitchen workers in an airstrike in April; and then in May, when he opposed a ground invasion of Rafah, in Gaza’s south, where more than a million Palestinians have sought safety, and paused the delivery of 3,500 bombs to Israel.

But the White House’s red lines have proved flexible. UN experts have repeatedly criticised that the aid entering Gaza is wholly inadequate, and in July, announced that famine had spread through the entire Gaza Strip, with some 8,000 children affected by malnutrition according to recent UN counts. And as Israeli airstrikes killed scores of civilians sheltering in Rafah, the White House remarked that while the incidents were “heartbreaking”, they did not cross the stated red line.

Democrats and Republicans united by their ‘love for America’

It is perhaps Bernie Sanders, his erstwhile rival for the Democratic nomination in 2020, who best encapsulated Biden’s character when he endorsed him for the presidential race: “I know you are the kind of guy who is going to be inclusive. You want to bring people in, even people who disagree with you. You want to hear what they have to say.”

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Biden himself stressed time and time again how important it was for him to bring people together, as he did when Republican Nikki Haley withdrew from her party’s presidential primary in March.

“I know that Democrats and Republicans and Independents disagree on many issues and hold strong convictions,” read a statement issued by Biden. “That’s a good thing. That’s what America stands for. But I also know this: what unites Democrats and Republicans and Independents is a love for America.”