The End of Joe Biden—and the Democratic Establishment

Martin Gurri, author of The Revolt of the Public, is one of the most incisive explainers of our age. The former CIA analyst predicted the rise of Trump, Brexit, and BLM. Now, in his latest column for The Free Press, reprinted from Discourse, he predicts that Biden’s fate is sealed.

Joe Biden entered the Senate in 1973, at the tender age of 30. He looked like a president, he felt like a president, and he fully expected to rise to the top. His formula for success was that of every ambitious politician deprived by nature of directing principles or opinions: find the meandering mainstream of his party’s establishment, where the big fish swim, then wade in and drift. Biden was in turn strongly against and stridently for abortion, a righteous Vietnam dove and then a stern Iraq hawk, a friend of racist Democratic senators before becoming a promoter of compensatory quotas for racial minorities. 

Virtually every time a vacancy arose, Biden, by his own admission, considered running for the presidency. In 1988, at the age of 44, he actually did so—and failed. Biden may look and feel like a president, but he has never sounded like one. Long before old age turned him into a bleary-eyed mutterer, he tended to get lost in his own verbiage. He told fantastic stories about his personal life that could be easily disproved. He plagiarized bits from Bobby Kennedy and parts of a speech by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Biden, it seems, was as needy as he was ambitious. His campaign resembled a prolonged pratfall. He dropped out before the first primary.

Thanks to a few very big, very lucky breaks, this human weathervane eventually found himself in the White House. Just a few years later, however, President Biden’s luck looks to be running out. A disastrous performance in last month’s presidential debate pulled back the curtain, in the style of The Wizard of Oz, to reveal the president as the sad, confused old man most of us already knew him to be. Then the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, and the former president’s courageous reaction in the moments following the incident, cast Biden’s shortcomings and infirmities in an even more glaring contrast. Biden is now increasingly alone, abandoned by the very establishment that created him. For both the king and what was once his court, a terrible reckoning has arrived. 

How Biden Became a Magnificent Replica of Himself

Biden spent 36 years in the Senate but never rose to any kind of power or influence there. His hour in the sun came in 1991 when, as chair of the Judiciary Committee, he was charged by Democratic Party grandees with the destruction of Clarence Thomas as a nominee to the Supreme Court. He failed. Thomas’s eloquence and intellectual firepower easily overwhelmed the woodenly partisan Biden.

Although an elite among elites and a member in good standing of the Democratic Party establishment, few of the decision-makers who knew Biden took him seriously. He was, in the words of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, “an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two”—but not a front man, not a protagonist, never the king. One can imagine Biden’s chagrin as the years passed him by. He had done everything asked of him. He had kissed rings and bowed to his superiors. Yet, though once a young lion, he was now viewed by his peers as “almost ridiculous— / Almost, at times, the Fool.”

Then the inscrutable destiny that rules over human lives struck like lightning. Barack Obama, the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee, picked Biden to be his vice president. No Democratic insider would have done so, but Obama was very much an outsider and he needed a harmless establishment figure to balance his “transformational” image. Maybe he thought that a shuffling, compliant white guy would be payback for past stereotypes. Anyone paying close attention should have known, by this choice, that Obama was less interested in transforming the system than in taking charge of it.

It is impossible to fail if you are the U.S. vice president, but Biden was locked out of the Obama inner circle and received no sexy special assignments. “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” was Obama’s famous verdict on his vice president. As in the Senate, Biden had the perks but not the power—or the respect. Nobody saw him as the natural successor to Obama. It was Hillary Clinton’s turn. Few considered him a player in the scramble to defeat Trump in 2020. At 78, he was much too old and slow.

Nevertheless, he shambled into the race. He began as he usually did—by failing. He lost contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, and seemed on the verge of irrelevancy: a has-been pursuing an impossible dream. But then destiny intervened again, in the form of the Democratic establishment that for years had treated Biden as something of a joke. Suddenly, from utter desperation, he became their man.