As Biden exits the stage, What next for Democrats who are uncharacteristically quiet

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Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) honoured President Joe Biden, a leaving government figure whose presence is slowly disappearing from the Capitol, in front of a practically empty chamber.

During his remarks on Tuesday, Durbin hailed Biden as “one of the finest public servants” in American history and a “source of hope and an author of history.” The Senate adjourned for a lunch break after the seasoned legislator concluded his six-minute address. As is common in farewell tribute speeches, no one else stood to applaud or support his appreciation of Biden.

Democrats are having a hard time understanding what Biden’s legacy means. They welcomed Biden’s bid for a second term and celebrated their joint legislative achievements for years, but many now blame his unpopularity for locking their party out of power in the new Washington. An examination of Senate floor speeches shows that since early December, when tribute speeches for departing senators came out virtually every day, only two Democrats have stood up to applaud Biden.

Whether they knew Biden from his eight years as vice president or his 36 years in the Senate, Democrats on Capitol Hill genuinely liked him. When his campaign dissolved following his debate performance against Trump on June 27, some of the most devoted members of Congress, who had only known him as president, remained with him.

Democrats are quick to list their favourite policy achievements when asked about his legacy, but they find it difficult to explain why people did not support Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris once she took the party’s nomination, credit for those victories.

“You might not have predicted that Joe Biden was going to be the most effective president on climate action, but that’s exactly what happened with the Inflation Reduction Act. So, for me, that’s the unsung legacy of this administration,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said Tuesday.

Citing the bipartisan 2022 legislation that is revolutionising the tech manufacturing industry, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) stated, “He is the first person to shift from a policy of consumerism that was leading to massive trade deficits and a hollowing-out of manufacturing, to say that we needed to build things in America again. We needed to be a nation of producers again,”

Schatz said that Biden was “the most consequential president of our lifetimes” in a statement following his withdrawal from the presidential race on July 21. Just hours before he withdrew, Khanna, 48, defended Biden on national television as having a “bold vision” that could still defeat Trump.

Despite enacting policies that directly targeted younger voters, Schatz, 52, blamed Biden’s age for simply making it impossible to connect with them.

“I think the messenger matters. And I think it was very hard to make the case to young people that a leader had their back when our leader was many generations removed from them,” he said in an interview Tuesday, citing Biden’s work on labor organizing and consumer rights as achievements. “What they saw was a person that they couldn’t relate to.”

A favourite liberal hero, the late Mario Cuomo, who talked about running for office in prose and running for office in poetry, was cited by Khanna, 48. According to Khanna, that dualism had been absent for the previous four years.

“I think we had the prose, but we were missing the poetry. I mean, we had to be out in these communities touting the economic revival,” Khanna said.

According to Khanna, the administration’s appeal sounded more like it was intended for academics than it did for the Irish poetry Biden frequently cited. “He needed more Irish poets in the White House to surround him.”

However, it misses the fact that Harris, who is more than 20 years younger than Biden, also failed to connect with those people. Biden’s age and cultural differences are to blame.

In front of thousands of applauding admirers, she boasted about being a “brat” and gave victorious speeches, garnering public support from celebrities like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé.
However, after the network exit polls concluded tabulations, Harris, 60, only garnered 54% of the support of voters between the ages of 18 and 29, compared to 60% for Biden in 2020.

Trump, 78, received 43 percent of the youth vote, the highest percentage of any GOP contender since 2004.

Durbin, 80, attributed the Democratic loss on a worldwide slump. In an interview following his speech honouring Biden, he stated, “Look across the world: You find incumbent governments of both political stripes losing elections, as we did here in November.”

“We are dealing with economic forces and social forces that are powerful all across the world. And Joe Biden and Kamala Harris paid a price for that,” he added.

To a certain extent, that unidentified X factor has prevented Democrats from speaking out or offering high praise for an administration they view as the most successful since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicare and significant civil rights legislation into law.

For Democrats, the Biden legacy raises an existential question: Have Americans lost interest in Washington, or are they unconcerned with achievements like a significant infrastructure program and a reduction in the price of prescription medications?

“He never gave up on the promise of our democracy, our nation and this institution in particular. The record of the bipartisan legislation that got passed under his leadership, I think, is striking and will stand the test of time,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware) said in a Dec. 20 speech on the Senate floor.

From the Senate floor, that was the only additional special tribute speech given to Biden. Coons is a family friend of the president and currently occupies Biden’s former Senate seat.

He utilises the desk that Biden used as a senator and vice president in his office, and he sits in Biden’s former desk on the Senate floor. He’s an admittedly biased observer.

Many Democrats have argued that instead of passing the baton to Harris so late, Biden should have waited for a full primary to choose a nominee before running for a second term.

History will prove that Biden should not have ran, according to Durbin, who is unsure if that would have made a difference.

“I believe Joe Biden sincerely felt that he could win reelection, as he had beaten Trump before. But having said that, sometimes we’re our own worst critics. We don’t see the real world. We see our world. And in this situation, he didn’t see clearly what lies ahead,” Durbin said.

Khanna, from the left fringe of the party, slammed the Harris campaign for a play-it-safe strategy that did not make bold policy promises for another Democratic term in the White House.

“It was too incremental, and it was not sufficiently understanding people’s frustrations,” he said.

Schatz claimed that defining the legacy of this administration is useless because historians have seen former one-term presidents like Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush more favourably than voters have.

“We’re too close to know, in time, because I think legacies of presidents get sorted over a matter of decades,” he said.

With so little clarity on what went wrong, most Democrats are more concerned with how to fight for a second Trump term than they were with Biden eight years ago when his time as vice president came to an end. Dozens of senators from both parties gathered on the floor to hear speeches honouring their long-time friend during a tribute day that Coons had planned at the time. As president of the Senate, Biden sat in the chair of the presiding officer and became emotional throughout the tributes.

Rick Scott (R-Florida), the sole other senator, presided over the debate on Tuesday while Durbin assumed that position. Hovering around were a few Senate floor aides.

Even Durbin appeared to acknowledge that today’s voters did not value the achievements of the outgoing administration.

“When future generations hear the name Joe Biden,” he said, “they’ll think of the incredible growth, recovery and progress America has made under his leadership.”

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