By Nicholas Kristof
In an instant, President Joe Biden has reshaped America.
By bowing out of the presidential race, he appears to have increased the odds that Democrats can hold onto the White House and compete strongly for control of Congress. He may have set in motion a historic process that could result in a woman becoming the most important person in the world, a step that would reshape gender norms worldwide.
Biden’s act of political self-sacrifice caps an extraordinary career of public service, including a presidency more productive than others, even some that lasted twice as long. Biden’s announcement also offers a stark contrast between his devotion to the national interest and Donald Trump’s long focus on his own personal interest.
I suspect that Biden’s withdrawal may also nurture another norm: one against aging leaders, following the preference of many voters in polls. Perhaps Biden is fostering a principle that aging presidents should not seek second terms.
Biden’s decision also marks a generational transition in American politics. In his 1961 inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy celebrated the torch being passed to the greatest generation. Then, in 1993, President Bill Clinton claimed power for baby boomers, who have since held it for more than three decades. Once more the torch will be passed to a new generation of Americans.
Presidents are most important for the way they influence vast and distant stretches of America and the world, places that denizens of Washington, D.C., may never have heard of. The most momentous presidencies — such as those in the last century of Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan or Lyndon Johnson — were significant primarily for what unfolded on foreign battlefields and on main streets around America. The history that they unspooled was written in places like the Dust Bowl or in the Jim Crow South.
Biden’s presidency already has reshaped towns across America with everything from broadband to insulin price caps to a (unfortunately temporary) refundable child tax credit that helped reduce child poverty by half. All that is an immense legacy.
With the announcement that he is withdrawing from the race, Biden builds on that legacy — and once more it is less about Washington than about the difference his choice not to run again will make around the country and the world. My guess is that because a Democrat is now more likely to win the White House, Russia is less likely to defeat Ukraine and China is less likely to go to war with Taiwan. Women are more likely to be able to get a legal abortion. The Education Department is more likely to survive and so, for that matter, is a healthy American democracy.
Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him. I would prefer to see a competition to choose as nominee the person most likely to beat Trump, but Democrats will have to sort that out.
What is clear is that Joe Biden had a productive term in office and should be proud of his accomplishments. But without diminishing those achievements, historians may look back in their assessments of Biden’s presidency and paraphrase what Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth: Nothing became his presidency like the leaving of it.