Joe Biden is the first president in over a decade to serve in the Oval Office without the benefit of a cult of personality around him — the cloying, strained, and ultimately aborted efforts to make “Dark Brandon” a thing notwithstanding. For the country, that’s no loss. Biden’s relative charisma deficit has restored to its proper place the transactional interdependence between a public servant and the public he serves. For Biden, though, that’s cold comfort. If the president cannot hold up his end of the bargain, his value to his constituents is spent.
The value proposition Joe Biden’s presidency represents varies depending on the constituency to whom he is appealing. He’s a bridge to the next generation of Democrats. Well, the Democratic farm team’s bench is looking mighty thin these days, and Biden himself seems to believe that his party’s progeny isn’t ready to take the reins. He’s a dealmaker who can get things done. Biden has delivered the goods on some fronts, but not nearly what he promised — sapping the already overhyped importance of bipartisan legislation on climate, guns, and infrastructure significance and disappointing his more naïve constituents. Maybe most critically to the Biden brand, he’s a winner — the insurmountable obstacle before the Trumpified Republican Party’s resurgence. Recent polling has called even this mantle of success into question.
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