Joe Biden is leaving Washington with few to no allies. His own party sliced his candidacy to death, reportedly lead by the man who made him Vice-President 16 years ago and the powerful former Speaker he was friends with for decades. The media has laid his Vice-President’s defeat at his feet. The opposition blames him for everything from migrants at our border to inflation. Despite record low unemployment, record four year job creation, and rising wages, the public thinks his economy stunk. It’s hard to think of any positive coverage or feelings towards the 46th President right now. Even the activist groups he rewarded with student loan forgiveness, gun control legislation, and a record number of judges have moved on from the Biden White House. It’s fitting that he eulogized President Carter in one of his last major speeches. His Presidency will, in the near term, be equated with President Carter’s.

To be fair, Joe Biden brought some of this on himself. He built a White House around him filled with people who really didn’t owe their careers to him. That White House lacked powerful voices that were articulating his vision. His promises and achievements to liberal interest groups cast him as a “normal” Dem at a time when the Democratic brand is at it’s lowest popularity in a couple decades. His cabinet was full of experts and wonks, but short on inspiring messengers to put out to communicate with America. His public promise to pick a woman Vice-President opened the door to Republicans attacks on her as a “DEI hire.” He aged before our eyes, as an 80 years ago old man should, but never really addressed the elephant in the room. He picked a cautious Attorney General when he needed an aggressive pitbull. He allowed bad actors on the Supreme Court, in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, and running tech companies to drag out his Presidency. He seemed unaware of his sagging poll numbers as his re-election campaign sulked along for months, lacking any real, positive vision of why he deserved a second term. The Hunter saga drug on way too long. Trump remained too focal in his message. He clearly got nothing right with that June debate. Joe Biden got a lot wrong. Probably stuff I left out of here. For that reason, he’ll wake up on Tuesday as a former President.

I mentioned President Carter above, and he’s a great reference point for President Biden- Biden will leave office with 36% approval in his final poll, President Carter was at 34%. Carter went on to live nearly 44 years out of office, and his approval improved substantially. Harry Truman and Donald Trump left office in roughly the same range, and both saw markedly solid improvement out of office. LBJ left with 49% approval, but has also seen some image improvement. It is in fashion right now to regard Biden as nothing more than a pause in the two Trump terms. History suggests that won’t be a popular view soon.

The Biden Administration began in the midst of a major pandemic and on the heels of an attack on our Capitol on January 6th. Because those events subsided, we largely have politically forgotten about them. In time, that is likely to matter more. Sure, it is possible that the doomsayers are right, and Trump ends democracy and feeds us propaganda about Biden, but I’m not in that doomsayer camp. I think it is just as likely that the next four years are less eventful than people think, maybe even disappointingly so, and the passage of time leads to higher marks for President Biden. I don’t know that he’ll ever see it in his lifetime, but he may even become a fairly popular figure. Maybe even a 21st century version of Truman or LBJ.

Many of Biden’s critics in Washington will never rise to the level of giving a farewell address from the Oval Office. Few men really do, and sometimes their speeches are actually fairly memorable, because they say something actually profound. Joe Biden did that this week. In a speech that is being panned by critics across the spectrum, he gave us shades of President Eisenhower’s farewell, in which he warned us about the military industrial complex. President Biden warned us about the unchecked powers of big tech companies and the dangers of a few very rich men consolidating power within an oligarchy. This coming Monday we will watch an inauguration largely funded and attended by tech giants from Apple, Amazon, X (Twitter), OpenAI, and Meta, to name a few. These billionaires run companies that make them unbelievable wealth, in an industry almost totally unregulated by Washington. Many of them have extremely large government contracts that fund their excess. Several of them spent unheard of amounts of personal cash to influence the election. Others have censored the free flow of information to the public, on the behalf of the incoming President. Biden’s warnings about these dangers in his farewell are less predictions of the future and more an acknowledgment of where we are now. We may have little ability to stop them right now, but we probably need to make this front and center to our future.

For 50 years, Joe Biden had a front row seat to history. Now, as he put it, it’s someone else’s turn to stand guard. Democrats shouldn’t go overboard and call for an end to capitalism and free enterprise. Democrats should heed his warnings though. The next four years of Trump will be about deregulating corporate America, cutting spending on programs that benefit normal people, and cutting taxes for the super rich. This isn’t going to benefit successful six figure earners that worked hard and made it. It’s going to benefit people who inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from their daddy. The next four years is designed to benefit them, not us. The Democratic Party Biden is leaving behind is not equipped right now to fight that battle. We need to heed the voice of experience and wisdom, and find authentic voices who can credibly articulate our case.

Goodbye, good sir.