Biden’s record makes him the best president of the 21st century

Michael J.Hicks
| Indianapolis Star

Normally, it is best to judge political careers after someone has left office. But these are not normal times.

President Biden’s career has been long and enduring, but not without its flaws. When partisan sentiments fade, his presidency will be judged as the high point of his career. He has been an influential American president.

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Biden has held elected office for all but four of the past 54 years, as a city council member, a U.S. senator, a vice president, and ultimately a president. No public official does it all well, and Joe Biden is no exception.

His early years in the Senate marked him as a centrist Democrat. For 16 of his first 20 years in the Senate, the GOP controlled the White House. So most of his legislative efforts were focused on creating compromise budget bills, judicial appointments and expanding regulations.

Two things distinguished Biden’s Senate career. First, he worked to understand policy issues and craft legislation that would work as intended. Second, he became a strong institutionalist in the compromise process. He focused on making congressional deliberation and oversight a practical part of governing.

The Senate today is full of people who despise the hard work of understanding a problem. Instead, they raise money and look for another job. Biden took the job seriously and worked hard at it.

Foreign Policy Blunders

The strongest criticism of Biden as a senator is undoubtedly his poor judgment on foreign policy. In 1991, he voted against authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein’s aggression — a war that was backed by the United Nations and fought by a coalition of more than 40 countries. Later that year, he pushed for U.S. unilateral intervention in the Bosnian civil war, which had no supporting alliance. Two years later, he opposed President Clinton’s planned intervention in Haiti to stop the civil war there. Six years later, Biden supported our post-9/11 invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq.

These positions are dizzying in their contradictions. It is not for nothing that Robert Gates noted that Biden “has been wrong on almost every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Biden’s public service was marked by two tragedies. First, in the days after his election to the Senate, his wife and baby daughter were killed in a car accident. His sons, Beau and Hunter, were seriously injured. Decades later, as vice president, Beau, an Iraq War veteran and Delaware attorney general, died of brain cancer.

That tragedy convinced Biden to skip his third run for president. His first attempt, in 1988, was derailed after one of his speeches seemed to mimic that of Neil Kinnock, a British political leader. Those accusations seem old-fashioned by today’s standards and expose the deep, exculpatory concern for personal character that characterizes much of America’s beleaguered electorate.

It’s hard to judge Biden’s time as vice president, except to say that his skills as a long-serving senator likely contributed to President Obama’s legislative victory over the Affordable Care Act. It’s Biden’s presidency that has defined his place in American history.

Biden led world’s strongest recovery from pandemic

Biden took the oath of office amid the worst global pandemic in a century, a 6.4% unemployment rate and a global recession. Two weeks earlier, his predecessor helped orchestrate a clumsy uprising that was the first challenge to a peaceful transfer of power in nearly 250 years of American democracy.

Only Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman rose to office under such trying circumstances.

Almost immediately, Biden began legislating. His administration passed a second COVID relief bill. It was much smaller than the CARES Act passed during the Trump administration, and together these bills pushed us out of recession much faster than any other developed country. These bills also accelerated inflation, which did not really begin until late 2022, leading to misperceptions about the overall performance of the economy.

Legislatively, the remainder of the Biden administration has been the most successful term of the 21st century. Domestically, the George W. Bush administration was severely hampered by foreign affairs. In eight years, Bush managed to pass a tax cut, an education bill, and a transportation bill. Both the Obama and Trump presidencies were largely limited to one piece of legislation; tax cuts for Trump and health care for Obama.

Biden, on the other hand, has passed a major infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act, probably the only legislation ever to onshore an American industry. Biden also came very close to passing a major immigration bill, but, like Bush before him, was derailed by Republicans who preferred to campaign on failed policies rather than vote for a fix.

Biden kept his promise to end the war in Afghanistan and ordered a poorly planned and executed withdrawal from a war that had already lasted two decades. That he followed through on the Trump administration’s exit plan is no excuse. This was a mistake, even if it was unlikely to have long-term consequences.

By contrast, Biden orchestrated the most significant American foreign policy success since the fall of the Soviet Union, and perhaps the second most significant since World War II. The invasion of Ukraine marked a crucial turning point in his foreign policy success.

Biden mobilized NATO and quickly sent money and equipment to Ukraine to counter a massive Russian invasion. Outnumbered and outgunned, Ukrainian forces repelled the invasion and recaptured most of the lost territory within a few months. Today, Ukraine has defeated Russian offensive capabilities and is in a stalemate.

Biden’s efforts brought two previously neutral countries — Sweden and Finland — into NATO. It was a spectacular foreign policy success, cementing an alliance that has gone to war only once — in defense of the U.S. after 9/11. The president’s visit to Israel in the days immediately following the Oct. 7 terrorist attack will also be remembered as a major, if not the most important, message of support for our beleaguered ally.

Biden’s decision not to seek a second term will be a footnote to his presidency. He will be better remembered for overseeing the strongest economic recovery from the pandemic in the developed world while passing major domestic policy bills. Most importantly, he will be credited with shoring up U.S. national security against a well-organized, pro-Russian faction in Congress.

Unlike his predecessor, Biden rose to the challenge of his office and gave the American people a presidency that was meaningful in difficult times.

Michael J. Hicks is director of the Center for Business and Economic Research and professor of economics at Ball State University’s Miller College of Business.