Joe Biden’s departure exemplifies why he had to bid farewell

Joe Biden said his farewell to the nation Wednesday night, and it was the same old malarkey.

He didn’t even leave.

If you watched this speech not knowing what led up to it, you’d have no idea why Biden was not running for re-election.

There wasn’t a word about his age, his recent public stumbles, or the pressure from his party.

There was no apology and no self-reflection.

From watching Biden, however, you could guess.

Instead, Biden sermonized on the importance of character and telling the truth, as if he and his White House hadn’t spent years misleading the public about the president’s capacity to do the job.

If you watched waiting for an explanation of why he thinks he can still do that job and doesn’t need to resign, you didn’t get that, either.

Biden talked about what he still wants to do, but not how this old man, slurring his cliches for 13 minutes off a TelePrompter, is supposed to do it.

If Donald Trump tested the nation’s patience by speaking for 92 minutes at the Republican convention, Biden demonstrated why he couldn’t go a fraction of that distance even if he needed to.

If you watched looking for a warm endorsement of Kamala Harris, you didn’t get much.

Biden gave her a generic shout-out that said nothing about what she actually contributed to his administration.

But then, what is there to say?

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The latest on President Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race:

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Of course, an Oval Office speech to the nation isn’t supposed to be a campaign speech.

But this was still a campaign speech, and nothing else.

Biden rehashed the supposed highlights of his presidency, and insulted the intelligence of his listeners with claims to have defeated crime and secured the border.

His main message was that he was stepping aside because to “save our democracy,” by which he means winning the next election – as if democracy is over if the voters change who’s in charge.

He won’t stop touting that message even though Trump was nominated by 17 million Republican primary voters, while Harris was handed her nomination after Nancy Pelosi and George Clooney led a revolt of donors and elites.

Biden wants Americans to believe that he’s a unifier who stands against “hate and extremism” and “political violence,” but at every turn his entire argument depends upon demonizing his opponents and blaming them for all of those things.

In a telling slip, borrowing the words of Abraham Lincoln, he started to say that we are “not enemies but friends,” but caught himself midway through “friends” and said “fellow Americans” instead.

Lincoln, in his first inaugural address on the eve of civil war, could still call the Confederates who had already declared secession “friends.”

Biden couldn’t quite manage it.

The most ominous part of the speech, however, was when he announced that he still intends to pursue “Supreme Court reform” and that it is vital to “democracy.”

Biden is reportedly preparing a plan for “limiting” the Supreme Court with term limits and other schemes aimed at ousting several of the conservative justices.

This is Court-packing by another name. It would demolish 235 years of unbroken tradition of securing an independent judiciary through life tenure.

That’s bad for democracy. Judges are supposed to enforce the Constitution and laws as they were written precisely because they were written by the elected representatives of the people.

If you change the judges, you can change the laws without winning elections.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1937 Court-packing plot was so dangerous that the Senate Judiciary Committee, run by his own party, warned that it “should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.”

Biden himself once said that FDR’s plan showed that he’d been “corrupted by power.”

If we judge Joe Biden by his last act, he won’t be leaving the Oval Office a moment too soon.