A sitting president reduced to an afterthought delivers an off-Broadway farewell to Democrats.

Since Joe Biden was willing to accept the humiliation of being forced out of his campaign for reelection, perhaps it follows that he would be amenable to accepting the final indignity of delivering his farewell address at his party’s convention on a night usually reserved for second- and third-tier speakers. Indeed, the unconventional decision to have the sitting president speak on the first night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC)  – as opposed to either not speaking at all or being placed in a prominent slot on a succeeding night – was undoubtedly the product of a tortured compromise.

To add to the indignity, the DNC ran so far behind schedule on its opening night that the president did not even appear until 36 minutes after his scheduled start time of 10:50 pm ET, which by itself was something of an insult, and led some to question if the delay was deliberate, or effectively an attempt to drive Biden out of view to the primetime audience.

Amidst orchestrated chants of “thank you, Joe,” an amped-up Biden spoke for 52 minutes about the “peril and possibility” of his presidency, again dredging up the debunked “very fine people on both sides” argument about the Charlottesville episode, which he claims led to him seeking the presidency for a third time.  He spoke angrily, particularly about the days following 1/6/21, declaring that “democracy has prevailed” and bragged about an economy he built from the cleverly undefined “bottom up and middle out.” His money line was a call for putting “a prosecutor in the Oval Office instead of a convicted felon.”

Biden Delivers Own Political Eulogy

While it is true that outgoing presidents have spoken at party conventions in the past, Biden’s appearance on Monday evening at the convention was unlike any of the previous trio of speeches, all by two-term presidents still wildly popular within their respective parties. When Bill Clinton spoke in support of his Vice President Al Gore in 2000 as his administration was concluding, he was greeted by conventioneers as a hero. Ronald Reagan received a similarly raucous ovation when he endorsed his VP, George H.W. Bush, at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in 1988. And Dwight Eisenhower was celebrated when he endorsed his second in command, Richard Nixon, at the RNC in 1960.

Biden’s farewell is more like that of Lyndon Johnson, another one-term president who withdrew from the 1968 presidential race after concluding he could not be reelected because of the Vietnam War. But LBJ announced his withdrawal in March, allowing a competitive primary to take shape, and stood clear of the riotous convention in Chicago months later, understanding he had become a lightning rod for the anti-war movement. Biden, on the other hand, saw the same portent of doom as Johnson but hung on until being all but forcibly removed from the top spot on the ticket in July, leaving Democrats with essentially no choice other than Kamala Harris.

And while Harris has received the expected warm embrace of big media and boosted the spirits of Democrats desperate to move on from the 81-year-old president, Biden realizes that it is he, not Harris, who has the most to lose come November 5. It is his administration that is being subjected to a referendum by the American people. Few could blame Harris for failing to overcome the polling deficit left behind by Biden’s personal and political descent. But many will certainly blame Biden.

Outsized Outcomes

Like the outsized stakes of this election itself, the outcome will be either a triumph or catastrophe for Joe Biden. If Harris wins, it will affirm his presidency and his legacy as the man who saved the country from Trump. But if Trump wins, Biden will forever be blamed for seeing the handwriting of his demise on the wall and stubbornly refusing to step aside until it was too late, ultimately handing the country back to the 45th president.

For the left, it would signal the effective end of the progressive era and the affirmation of a dangerous right-wing autocrat. But allowing Trump’s return to power would also be a fitting final analogy to the misstep from which Biden never recovered: his disastrous abandonment of Afghanistan, which ushered in the Taliban’s muscular return to power after two decades of now-wasted American blood and treasure. Much of the $80 billion in military hardware Biden left behind was paraded by the Taliban terrorists on the third anniversary of the withdrawal on August 14, another humiliation for Biden and the country, and a reminder of the chaos unleashed across the world on the watch of this commander-in-chief.

In a career marked by sustained power but constant disappointments –  two badly failed presidential campaigns, an unserious image, and rejection by Barack Obama in 2016 in favor of Hillary Clinton – the end is nigh for Joe Biden. He cashed in on extraordinary circumstances to finally reach the promised land, only to be betrayed by the irreversible indignity of his own cognitive decline. His half-century as the quintessential Washington insider was marked by bookends of success and failure, centrism and progressivism, and, in the end, youth and age. “For the longest time, I was too damn young because I only was 29 when I got elected,” Biden playfully lamented at a recent rally for his VP in Maryland. “Now I’m too damn old.”