Biden can go down as an American hero — but only if Harris can beat Trump

Biden did what he promised in restoring sanity to America in the 2020s, but few will remember if a dictatorial Trump returns.

by Will Bunch | Columnist

Published July 21, 2024, 7:59 p.m. ET

One of our earliest political legends is the tale of the ancient Roman leader Cincinnatus. It’s believed that in the year 458 B.C., Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a former senator — considered an old man for his time — was plowing his small farm when a delegation from Rome pleaded with him to return to the capital and put down a popular insurrection and vanquish the city-state’s restive neighbors.

Cincinnatus donned a toga, returned to Rome, crushed the various uprisings in just 15 days, and — mission accomplished — happily surrendered power and went back to his farm. His story is still told, 25 centuries later, as a parable of civic virtue and selflessness.

At 1:46 p.m. on the languid Sunday afternoon of July 21, 2024 — a date now etched in American history — President Joe Biden made his bid to become the American Cincinnatus.

The 81-year-old president, who’d said the sight of tiki-torch racists marching through Charlottesville, Va., brought him out of retirement to win the White House in 2020, stunned the nation — after three weeks of nonstop speculation about his frail health — by ending his candidacy just 32 days before he was supposed to claim the nomination for a second term at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He posted a letter ending his candidacy on the social media site X, minutes before a second tweet that endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to replace him.

On Jan. 20, 2025, Biden — in a modern echo of the Roman legend — will board Air Force One for the final time and return to Delaware for his second and last retirement. If Harris captures lightning between now and the Nov. 5 election, she will become America’s 47th and first female president. And Biden will go down in history books as an American hero who saved democracy from the chaos of authoritarianism by knowing when to run — and when to walk away.

But it won’t be easy. The reality is that Harris has just 107 days to reverse a clear Democratic deficit in the swing states, including Pennsylvania, and do what her party could not do in 2016: defeat a proudly misogynistic strongman in Donald Trump with a female candidate, in one of the few developed nations that has never been led by one.

And if Trump wins and implements the draconian Project 2025 plan for a “post-Constitutional” America, Biden won’t be celebrated in our national lore. He will be second-guessed and picked apart as a leader whose ego didn’t allow him to quit before the 2024 primaries, who promised in 2020 to be “a bridge” to America’s future, but then didn’t frantically lower that drawbridge until the ship of autocracy was about to slam into it.

If the worst-case scenario plays out, Biden won’t be remembered as a bridge, but as a brief air bubble of democracy, bracketed by the chaos of Trump’s first term and the dictatorial retribution of a second one. And that would be a shame because even with only one term, Biden has managed to be the most consequential American president of the last 60 years, since Lyndon B. Johnson enacted our fraying civil rights laws and created massive social welfare programs like Medicare before his own place in U.S. history was tarnished by the deadly mistakes of Vietnam.

In one nanosecond on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, the most important presidential election in American history has been stood on its head.

Biden — despite a deeply divided Capitol Hill that reflects a bitterly fractured America — got Republican votes to pass a large-scale infrastructure program, support chip manufacturers, and pass the first gun control legislation in decades. He had to play hardball to get around GOP intransigence and pass the largest climate change bill in history. The conservative U.S. Supreme Court blocked his ambitious student loan fix, but Team Biden still found ways to cut college debt by $167 billion.

Foreign policy was a mixed bag, but his plan to aggressively back Ukraine after Russia’s invasion was a deft defense of democracy abroad, even as the fight to save freedom here grew more perilous.

And yet, political mythmaking is often just that. Had you and I been alive in the age of Cincinnatus, we might be ripping him as an anti-plebeian elitist who abused power, even if for just two weeks.

Biden’s promise to voters to restore the values and wisdom of a career in national politics that began in 1972 included a huge blind spot toward Israel’s shift to far-right extremism. We cringed as his administration offered carrots to Benjamin Netanyahu during his Gaza slaughter instead of wielding a stick. The disgust among many Americans at the flood of images of dead Palestinian children can’t be underestimated as a factor that brought us to Biden’s 1:46 p.m. announcement.

But the real tragedy of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is an almost Shakespearean tale of hubris. The president’s remarkable life story of overcoming family tragedies and political humiliations seemed to blind Biden and his closest relatives and advisers to the reality that the octogenarian finally faced the one opponent who is impossible to beat: Father Time.

The immediate sense on Sunday afternoon was largely one of, “Why did this decision take so long?” Democrats seemed, for the most part, electrified at the idea of Harris — who’s ridden issues like reproductive rights and student debt to gain respect after a rocky start in the utterly thankless job of vice president — at the top of the ticket. If any prominent Democrat is scheming to challenge Harris in Chicago, they have been too timid to step forward.

In one nanosecond on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, the most important presidential election in American history has been stood on its head. Suddenly, it is the 78-year-old, often incoherently rambling Trump who is the oldest person ever to win his party’s nomination, and who is the one who needs to be answering some tough health questions.

Suddenly, a presidential candidate who is a convicted felon is slated in early September to debate California’s former top prosecutor, who rose to national prominence by grilling Supreme Court nominees.

The Republican candidate whose Milwaukee convention reeked of stale testosterone, who entered the arena arrogantly to the sounds of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” is frantically retooling to fight an energetic 59-year-old woman.

And if Harris turns this election upside down and becomes the 47th president of the United States, she will also forever save the legacy of the 46th. But in the end, the American plebeians who show up to vote in November will decide whether Biden becomes a hero of our democratic mythology or merely a tragic figure.