In March 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not seek reelection. It was an admission by Johnson that his administration failed in its conduct of the Vietnam War. His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, received the Democratic nomination and was trounced in an electoral landslide.
The Biden-Harris administration is weighed down with its own major failures. That’s why the administration’s job approval ratings are well underwater on every major question: inflation, the economy, the border, crime, and foreign policy. Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race is — no less than LBJ’s — an implicit admission that his administration has failed on the major issues of the day. But at least Biden and Harris have pretended to defend their record on these issues from time to time.
That’s not true for the signature promise of the 2020 Biden-Harris campaign — uniting the country. Just days before announcing that he was withdrawing from the presidential race, Biden expressly admitted that he and Vice President Harris failed Americans on this score as well. In fact, in his interview with BET last week, Biden didn’t just acknowledge that the country is divided. Instead, he conceded that things are even worse than that. In Biden’s words, the nation is “so, so, so divided.”
Unity Was a Centerpiece of the 2020 Campaign
“Unity” was a central theme and core promise of the 2020 Biden-Harris campaign. We all remember that, even if Biden doesn’t anymore.
In his victory speech — which he gave days after the election because of the tight results — Biden promised Americans: “I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify.” Biden reminded everyone that he “sought” the office of president specifically “to unite us here at home.”
Biden stressed to the nation that it was “time to put away the harsh rhetoric. To lower the temperature. To see each other again. To listen to each other again.” He further proclaimed: “Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end — here and now.”
Vice President-elect Harris got into the act too, declaring to Americans: “You chose Joe Biden as the next president of the United States of America. Joe is a healer. A uniter.”
Do we make too much of this Biden-Harris unity pledge? Judge for yourself.
But here is what the left-leaning media took away from the successful Biden-Harris ticket at the time: “The president-elect’s acceptance speech was a call to unite the nation.” They declared that “at the very least, the Biden presidency will mark a change in presidential rhetoric. The American people have a president-elect who talks about bringing the country together; about being the leader for all the people.”
Biden and Harris promised. But Biden and Harris utterly failed to deliver. Instead, Biden and Harris gave us a country that is “so, so, so divided.” And now Biden has admitted as much.
The Passive Voice Doesn’t Provide a Free Pass
Even as he admitted to the administration’s failure, Biden implicitly denied any responsibility for it. As Biden explained it: “When I originally ran … I said I was going to be a transitional candidate. … But I didn’t anticipate things getting so, so, so divided.”
To Biden, it’s a situation that must be described in passive voice. “Things” just happened to “get” more divisive while he was president. According to Biden, he couldn’t even “anticipate” these things. Yes, that’s right, the president who promised to end “demonization in America” in his victory speech now claims he couldn’t even anticipate a divided country.
The passive voice does not provide the administration with a free pass. As president, the buck stops with Biden. If Biden is less than competent — as it certainly appears — then, constitutionally, the buck stops with Harris. And now that Biden has apparently withdrawn from the presidential race, the buck stops with Harris politically as well. They are responsible for the national discord even if they hadn’t pledged that, under their leadership, Americans would experience the precise opposite — which is what they did.
Deliberately Divisive
Yet this is not just a question of responsibility. It’s a question of unclean hands. Biden and Harris have played a leading, active role in dividing the nation. A mere year and a half into his presidency, Biden declared he had no “respect” for “MAGA Republicans.” Those people — i.e., people who want to make America great again — represent at least one-half of the country. And Biden labeled them “semi-fascists.”
Harris dutifully defended Biden’s outrageous comments: “[T]here are moments in time when we have to also agree, all good people who care about our country, that there are those who are right now vividly not defending our democracy.” To the vice president, if you don’t support Biden-Harris, you’re not a good person, or you just don’t care about our country.
Since that time, Biden and Harris have not just stated their disagreements with Republicans. They have uttered a continuous stream of incendiary falsehoods. They claimed that their fellow Americans stood as “threats to our freedom” who were “determined to destroy our democracy.”
Even as the public began to see through these attacks, Biden and Harris doubled down on, and ratcheted up, their strategy of fear and hate. They claimed Republicans and their supporters were “worse” than “real racists.” They said we needed to put Trump in a “bullseye.” Then somebody did.
Even longtime allies have recognized, for some time, the administration’s total failure in this regard. “I’m just tired of hating,” explained Bill Maher. “Half this country seems to hate the other half.” “No one would wear a MAGA hat here” in New York City, and “nobody would wear a Biden T-shirt in — I don’t know — Tennessee. … That’s not a good place for the country to be.”
It’s a place Biden and Harris promised not to take us. Yet they led us there willfully and callously. Now Biden leaves the political stage for the last time just like LBJ — admitting a colossal failure of leadership by his administration.
Joseph LoBue is a retired Naval officer and attorney.
