What is President Joe Biden’s legacy? Franklin Foer, a staff writer at The Atlantic and biographer of President Joe Biden, is making a claim of what it is.
In an article published on Thursday, Foer writes, “Earlier this fall, one of Joe Biden’s closest aides felt compelled to tell the president a hard truth about Kamala Harris’s run for the presidency: ‘You have more to lose than she does.’And now he’s lost it.”
Foer then declared: “Joe Biden cannot escape the fact that his four years in office paved the way for the return of Donald Trump. This is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk.”
The writer noted he reached out to members of Biden’s inner circle for their thoughts on the campaign. They, however, “sounded as deflated as the rest of the Democratic elite.”
“They also had a worry of their own: Members of Biden’s clan continue to stoke the delusion that its paterfamilias would have won the election, and some of his advisers feared that he might publicly voice that deeply misguided view,” Foer added.
Foer shared that Biden advisers were “reluctant to say anything negative about Harris as a candidate,” but did talk about Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign.
“One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business,” he wrote.
Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich wrote on X Wednesday, “The blame game has begun inside Harris world.” She cites Lindy Li, a member of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) National Finance Committee and Pennsylvania commissioner, as IJR reported on.
Others tore into the Democratic Party, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who said in his statement, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right,” he added.
One Harris aide pointed at Biden as the person to blame, telling Politico, “We ran the best campaign we could, considering Joe Biden was president. Joe Biden is the singular reason Kamala Harris and Democrats lost tonight.”
