The legacy of the Biden presidency will be failure at home and abroad, censorship and lies, says JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin.
Just as important, he believes the manifest problems experienced by the nation in the past four years didn’t just lead to the return to power of President-elect Donald Trump, but also facilitated a realignment of American politics in which the Democrats have become the party of the credentialed elites while Republicans now represent the interests of working-class voters.
He’s joined by Commentary magazine editor John Podhoretz, who notes that Biden’s blaming the country for his failures, rather than his own mistakes, has had another consequence. The shift witnessed in 2024 is not just about class differences; it has altered the makeup of the electorate with Republicans becoming the more popular party than Democrats for the first time in a century.
In addition to analyzing the way Biden failed to satisfy and keep at bay both friends and foes of Israel, Podhoretz also argued that the decision by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to ignore the president’s advice was crucial to achieving his country’s victories over Hamas, Hezbollah and their Iranian backers.
“I think without question that, notwithstanding the lingering question of the hostages, this is not only the finest moment of his career,” said Podhoretz. “It’s also one of the finest moments of any Western politician since the end of the Cold War. And the more we learn about what was going on inside the councils of power in Israel, the more impressive I think his behavior has been.”
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