The president of the United States Joe Biden will cap his half-century political career with a final speech in the Oval Office on Wednesday, hoping to seal a legacy that has been overshadowed by Democrats’ failure to prevent him. donald trump return to the White House.
Biden ran for president in 2020 as a transitional figure, but opted, at the unprecedented age of 80, to run for re-election, convinced that he was the only Democrat who could defeat Trump.
Forced to abandon the race in July after a disastrous debate against TrumpBiden has been blamed by some Democrats for his defeat in November, after the vice president’s dizzying campaign Kamala Harris lost all the disputed states.
Biden and his allies oversaw the COVID-19 recovery, funded an infrastructure restart, boosted manufacturing of new semiconductor chips and addressed climate change as they sought to rebalance inequality and invest in the future. He leaves a top-performing U.S. economy and optimistic businesses.
But Biden failed to heal the divisions in the country as I expected or stop the democratic retreat in the world. His greatest political achievement – defeating Trump in 2020 – turned out to be temporary. Now, the Republican president-elect has vowed to undo much of what the Democratic administration accomplished.
“All Joe Biden wanted was to be remembered for the great things he did for this country and, at least in the short term, they have been overshadowed by his unfortunate decision to run,” he said. David Axelrodformer advisor to the president Barack Obama.
“He became a historic president when he defeated Trump. So obviously the fact that Trump is re-emerging and coming back to power, more powerful than when he left, is a sad end to the story”.
Biden addressed what he described as an ongoing threat to the country in a letter released early Wednesday by the White House.
“I ran for president because I believed the soul of America was at stake. The very nature of who we are was at stake. And that remains true,” he said, urging Americans to continue fighting for the country’s goal of focusing on equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
A White House official said that legacies are established in the long term.
“In historical terms, a millisecond has passed since the election. This president has achieved the most important legislative record since LBJ (the president Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s), and the irreversible benefits of those laws will increase over the decades,” the official said.
The senator Chris Coons, a longtime ally, said Biden faced an economic crisis, a public health crisis and a democracy crisis following the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters when he took office that year.
“The country was plunged into a deep crisis. The recovery from that pandemic has been his greatest achievement,” Coons said.
The Biden administration oversaw the distribution of COVID vaccines and an economic recovery that defied predictions of a recession, even as inflation soared and prices remained high, discouraging voters about his economic stewardship.
Republicans took advantage of public frustration in last year’s elections, stoking anger over high prices with accusations of Democratic elitism and disconnection of working-class voters, while blaming immigrants for high prices, despite the lack of tests.
“Four and a half decades of rising inequality cannot be reversed with a few years of absolutely positive economic results and policy changes,” he said. Heidi Shierholzpresident of the Economic Policy Institute. “But one of the most fundamental things they did was provide recovery relief on the scale necessary to generate a strong jobs recovery.”
Biden, who spent more than three decades in the U.S. Senate and eight years as Obama’s vice president before his four years as president, cites a unified Western response to Russia’s war with Ukrainestrengthening alliances and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan as key foreign policy achievements.
However, 13 US service members died during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, and Biden’s popularity never recovered.
His staunch support for Israel, which killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in response to the Hamas militant group’s deadly attack on Israel, divided the Democratic Party and Biden’s reputation with the left suffered.
Vincent Rigby former senior national security advisor to the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeausaid Biden will forever be remembered as a “interlude” president despite his strong achievements in rebuilding trust in the United States after Trump’s first term.
“We will see how history treats him in five, ten or fifteen years, but he will be seen as the president between the two Trump presidencies. He stood firm, but Trump returned to the fray”.
(With information from Routers)
