OPINION:
In The Washington Post’s self-righteous telling, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It says so every day, right there below the paper’s masthead.
But democracy also dies in historical revisionism of the sort found Sunday in The Post’s lead story, directly below the masthead and across five columns, titled “Joe Biden’s lonely battle to sell his vision of American democracy.”
Tyler Pager’s fourth installment in a four-part series “How Biden Leads” reads like a cross between a defense of President Biden’s failed (my word, not his) term and a sycophantic hagiography.
There are so many “what might have beens” in Mr. Pager’s opus, it’s hard to know where to begin dissecting and dismantling them.
The article begins with Rep. James Clyburn, the South Carolina Democrat who was instrumental in getting Mr. Biden nominated in 2020. Mr. Clyburn recounts a meeting with the president last year as Mr. Biden prepared to seek reelection. Mr. Clyburn lamented that Mr. Biden’s supposed campaigning on “substance” was no longer a good fit in an era where style supposedly trumps (pun intended) substance.
(As an aside, it was as if Mr. Clyburn had memory-holed Barack Obama’s performative “hope and change” candidacies, which were nothing if not style over substance.)
“After Donald Trump’s ascent, Biden believed that he just needed to show Americans that traditional democracy still worked — by listening to experts, working with Republicans, passing popular policies — and voters would rally around him,” Mr. Pager wrote, claiming with scant evidence that Mr. Biden “had succeeded in Phase One of his plan.”
When you begin with such a dubious — if not demonstrably false — premise, however, much of what follows is also likely to be wrong.
“[P]hase Two never happened,” Mr. Pager writes. “The truth of Biden’s presidency is that he failed in what was, by his own account, his most important mission: making Trump’s presidency seem like an aberration.”
Mr. Biden and Mr. Pager might regard President-elect Donald Trump’s presidency as “an aberration,” but Americans who gave Mr. Trump 11.2 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016 didn’t see it that way. Moreover, voters doubled down in 2024, giving Mr. Trump nearly 3.2 million more votes on top of that. (For the record: just under 63 million in 2016, 74.2 million in 2020 and 77.3 million in 2024.)
Mr. Biden’s governing “through traditional processes and institutions … didn’t do anything to end the very intense polarization that exists in this country,” Princeton University presidential historian Julian Zelizer is quoted as lamenting.
To the contrary, the Biden administration’s far-left policies — open borders, trillions of dollars in deficit spending that spawned 45-year-high inflation and interest rates, fealty to a pro-abortion, pro-transgender, pro-diversity, equity and inclusion agenda — only exacerbated that polarization.
The only thing surprising about the “intense polarization” is that Mr. Zelizer (and, by extension, Mr. Biden and Mr. Pager) were surprised by it.
In Mr. Zelizer’s case, it could be because of the clueless crowd that he runs with. “Some Biden allies point to a recent survey of historians that ranked Biden the 14th-best president in American history, while putting Trump last,” Mr. Pager notes. But those historians have about as much credibility as the 51 intelligence officials who lied at the height of the 2020 presidential campaign when they asserted that Hunter Biden’s laptop had the “hallmarks of Russian disinformation.”
Those historians notwithstanding, after Mr. Biden’s four years in the White House, President Jimmy Carter — who died at age 100 on the day the Post article appeared in print — can rest in peace knowing that his presidency is no longer the worst of my lifetime.
Mr. Pager wrote that Mr. Biden argued “that he did not get enough credit for his accomplishments, especially on the economy.” That raises the question: What part of the aforementioned 45-year-high inflation driving up food and fuel prices — to say nothing of soaring housing prices that have made homeownership increasingly unaffordable — does the lame-duck president not understand?
In the same vein, Mr. Pager credited Mr. Biden with “avoid[ing] a recession that many economists considered inevitable,” when he surely knows that Mr. Biden avoided a recession, but in name only, because liberal economists brushed aside the long-standing definition of recession as being two or more consecutive quarters of declining gross domestic product. That’s a whopper for which Mr. Pager’s Post “fact-checker” colleague, Glenn Kessler, should award both of them three Pinocchios.
“Substantively, few analysts deny Biden’s accomplishments,” Mr. Pager swoons, citing as one of those accomplishments “mobilizing the government to vaccinate Americans against COVID-19, bringing the country out of a devastating pandemic.”
He might want to get second opinions on that accomplishment, however, from the thousands of service members Mr. Biden’s Pentagon drummed out of the military for refusing to take those largely experimental vaccines or from the millions of students whose education were irreparably harmed by unduly long school closures pushed on Mr. Biden by teachers unions, or from the thousands of mom-and-pop enterprises driven out of business by unnecessary restrictions on their operations.
Mr. Pager also credits Mr. Biden as having “rebuilt the trans-Atlantic alliance,” with the implication being that Mr. Trump had shattered it. But the latter is true only if you think that insisting that NATO’s 30 European members “pay their fair share” (to use one of Mr. Biden’s and liberals’ pet phrases) for their own defense — or Ukraine’s — is unreasonable.
And any discussion of Mr. Biden’s foreign policy would be incomplete without mentioning the catastrophic August 2021 pullout from Afghanistan. But leaving tens of billions of dollars in military hardware behind for the Taliban gets no mention in Mr. Pager’s detailing of “how Biden leads.”
And the fallback explanation of the failure of Mr. Biden’s “lonely battle to sell his vision of American democracy” is the Democrats’ reflexive excuse whenever they lose an election: “We didn’t get our message out.”
“Previous articles in this series … showed that Biden, even at the peak of his power, struggled mightily to communicate his decisions and vision.”
Au contraire: The American people were all too well aware of Mr. Biden’s “decisions and vision” when they went to the polls on Nov. 5. Voters correctly surmised that they would continue unabated if Vice President Kamala Harris were to succeed Mr. Biden and cast their ballots accordingly.
Mr. Pager devotes four lengthy paragraphs to how Mr. Biden and “some Democrats,” in hindsight, have faulted his attorney general, Merrick Garland, for adopting what they considered a “go slow” approach to prosecuting Mr. Trump.
“Had the Justice Department moved faster to prosecute Trump for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2000 election and mishandling classified documents” those Democrats say, the former president might have faced a politically damaging trial before the election,” Mr. Pager wrote.
Could it be that Mr. Garland recognized that those trumped-up (again, pun intended) charges were a baseless, nakedly political “weaponization” of the justice system and that he wasn’t comfortable pursuing a corrupt gambit just to win an election for the Democrats?
Even with all that said, there was much more to take issue with in Mr. Pager’s historical revisionist hagiography of Mr. Biden and his soon-to-end shambolic presidency, but why belabor the point?
Suffice it say that Mr. Pager should offer to be the ghostwriter of Mr. Biden’s autobiography. But libraries will have to shelve it under “fiction.”
• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.
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