The president needs to do more than say goodbye in his address this week.
“I’m going to say something outrageous,” Joe Biden said at his first press conference as president in March 2021. “I have never been particularly poor at calculating how to get things done in the United States Senate. So the best way to get something done, if you—if you hold near and dear to you that you like to be able to—anyway—we’re going to get a lot done.” From that starting point, despite his many successes, there has been a steady pileup of scatterbrained gaffes and mix-ups. He can still function as a human being, sure, but no longer as a president. Now he has COVID (again) and has removed himself from consideration as the Democrats’ presidential nominee.
Biden’s deterioration has a sense of curdling to it—not just of demise but also of spoil. There’s no going back. It is, to borrow his phrase, a big fucking deal.
The existential crisis of his now-terminated reelection campaign has so afflicted the national psyche that his urgent task ahead is not just to restore his party’s confidence and trust, or even to score election victories. He needs to do more. In the national address he plans to give later this week, he needs to remind himself and the American public just how miraculous and sacred the presidency is as an office of service over leadership. He needs to pivot from resigning his position to a rallying cry of civic duty and political purpose. There is even a blueprint for spinning such straw into gold: George Washington’s celebrated Farewell Address, when he decided in 1796 that two terms in office were enough, and more importantly, that no president should ever pretend that America depends on their charms or insights or talents.
That 1796 essay was first read in newspapers, over the intimacy of kitchen tables or in candlelit bedrooms. It was famously reread on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1862, after 1,000 Philadelphians petitioned it as a Civil War salve. It has been read in either the House or Senate—or both—every year since 1888.
The essay’s endurance is born out of the way Washington transformed his farewell into a reminder of civility, dignity, humility, and polity.
For all its celebrated splendor and might, Washington’s America needed that support; it carried a deeply resonant sense of frailty. The freedoms were hard-won, but so was stability: America’s capital city changed eight times before settling on Washington, D.C. Washington also saw America’s governing framework of supreme law change from the clumsy Articles of Confederation to the less clumsy Constitution, a do-over with a 235-year track record, but still a do-over capable of being done over itself.
Washington’s farewell address captured this precarity by embracing his own vulnerability and inevitable death (incidentally, not unlike Jesus did at the Last Supper). Washington acceded to his “very fallible judgment” that kept him “not unconscious at the outset of the inferiority of [his] qualifications.” With that selflessness at the core of public service, he wrote: “I have thence enjoyed of manifesting my inviolable attachment by services faithful and persevering, though in usefulness unequal to my zeal.”
Washington opposed the “baneful effects” of party politics and so knew that his farewell had to unite the nation, had to appeal to a consensus shared equally among artists and bankers, farmers and tradesfolk, soldiers and schoolteachers, even pastors and prisoners. “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism,” Washington wrote.
But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual, and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.
OK, founder. But what does it matter to Biden?
In his address later this week, the president could frame Washington’s patriotism as warning against Trumpists’ increasingly authoritarian ambitions. The first president stepped away as a warning against “despots”; Trump aims to be one, wrapped in the American flag. But that’s an easy takeaway. Too easy. The tougher truth Biden should tell is more complicated.
Biden needs to do more than reassure the country that he is out of the running because he is no longer capable of doing the job. He needs to do more than tell us he’s stepping aside because the threat of despotism is here, and he is no longer able to stop it. He needs to make Americans believe in democracy again. And that includes accounting for some of his own term, as well as Trump’s.
With Biden as their president-elect, Americans watched their compatriots ravage the Capitol in insurrection and threaten to lynch the vice president. Under Biden, they have seen more of their neighbors die of COVID than under the preceding presidency of Donald Trump, who implored people to inject bleach. They have seen their family’s lives, jobs, and classrooms simultaneously upended by a pandemic, from lockdown to the lingering work-from-home limbo. They saw affirmative action and abortion rights overturned. They even feared the apocalypse when the sun briefly was blotted out of sight. Overall, they have watched Trump become a convicted felon and watched Biden himself slowly lose both his mind and, arguably, his soul.
There has been an ironic Trumpian flair to Biden’s downfall: in his golf brags during the presidential debate, his bubble of family cheerleaders and idolizing sycophants, his vain fury that he is not universally recognized as both the world’s “most respected person” and the only American capable of delivering the White House to the Democrats this fall, and the creeping conservatism of his policies on immigration, oil production, and transgender rights, among others. Sad.
Asked if Biden will drop out of the race, even Trump had the awareness to reply: “He’s got an ego, and he doesn’t want to quit.”
He overcame that. But Biden also needs to remember that America’s power is not born of the caucuses, donors, or swing states that convinced him to go. “To the efficacy and permanency of your Union, a Government for the whole is indispensable,” Washington wrote. “No alliances, however strict, between the parts can be an adequate substitute.” Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama, sounded similar in his 2004 debut on the national stage: “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. … There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.” Biden himself grazed this sentiment in the letter he posted to social media over the weekend: “There is nothing America can’t do—when we do it together.” His address this week needs to carry on this message.
In these divisive times, Biden can remind Americans of the power of connection, solidarity, and unity. He can contextualize his departure with the truth that this election is—as all elections are—not about the power of the candidates or the parties but about the power of the people, with voting as an act of trust and not one of competition or zero-sum games.
Consider the way America realized Civil Rights, voting rights, and even the moon landing to honor JFK’s legacy. Biden can use this extraordinary moment of a dream deferred to channel similar national goodwill toward, say, curing cancer, closing Guantanamo Bay, paying slavery reparations, or passing a constitutional amendment for the first time since 1992. He could transform America not by managing it, but by inspiring it.
A page of Washington’s humility would help. “I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors,” Washington wrote, adding that he hoped that “the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion.”
If Biden wants to clarify the difference between himself and Trump, between what the two presidents stand for, he could do the one thing Trump can’t—or won’t: He could ask the American public for forgiveness as he relinquishes power.
Americans already know such intimate prostration in smaller everyday events: between loved ones in the moments before a major surgery, before a wedding, or after a graduation. We know how to center our respect and trust in loved ones. Biden should do that for the country and its people who he loves so dearly, as Washington did. He can restore that everyday instinct to make amends in big moments to political scheming.
He could ask women for forgiveness that America remains alone in its apathy over mandating paid maternity leave. He could ask forgiveness from American parents for their sudden uptick in infant deaths after Roe v. Wade was overturned. He could ask forgiveness of Black Americans for not rushing to the financial rescue of HBCUs as if they were banks or Ukrainian soldiers. He could apologize to American immigrants for dispatching his vice president to the Mexican border to say “Do not come.” He could ask forgiveness of Arab Americans for sending aid to Palestine while also sending weapons to Israel. He could ask Washingtonians and Puerto Ricans for forgiveness over not righting their untenable political purgatories. He could ask forgiveness of children that America led the world in oil production every year he was president despite the climate crisis. And he could ask forgiveness from Trump that he was unable to ban AR-15–style semiautomatic rifles.
Whatever weighs on his heart when he thinks of all the work yet to be done by President Kamala Harris and all who come after her, Biden could use his farewell as Washington did: to make his dying wishes known—everything he wanted even more than another run at the White House.
Spoiler alert: Biden is going to die. Maybe next week (COVID, after all, kills 37.7 percent of octogenarians) or maybe next decade. Death comes for us all. Not even the leader of the free world can veto it. For what it’s worth, Washington died in 1799 of epiglottitus and acute laryngitis. (He literally talked until he was blue in the face.) Thankfully America didn’t die with him—with great debt to his Farewell Address. Biden can bring the founders’ energy to the 21st century. Or not. The beauty of America is how it rolls along regardless of circumstance. That’s in large part thanks to Washington’s farewell. The beauty of Biden’s farewell is that it can still be rewritten.
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