Why Memory Hole the Biden-Harris Successes? 

Former Vice President Kamala Harris’s announcement that she’s publishing a book about the 2024 campaign, and her subsequent interview with Stephen Colbert, triggered a spate of “go away” comments from named and unnamed Democratic officeholders and strategists.” Her former running mate, President Joe Biden, has received much of the same whenever he has popped up in public.  

I share the frustration at Biden’s decision to run again when he wasn’t up to the task. And I understand the desire of some Democrats to “turn the page,” recruit fresh faces, and mount a 2028 presidential campaign that isn’t bogged down by past questions of Biden’s competency.  

But even if Democrats would be better off without Harris as their standard-bearer, they won’t be better off by pretending the Biden-Harris record doesn’t exist. The two enacted good policies, and they look better with each passing day of the erratic and cruel Donald Trump presidency. 

While it’s true that in November 2024, the strongest aspects of the Biden-Harris record were overshadowed by lingering frustration with inflation, it’s also true that a lot has happened since November 2024.  

Trump promised to lower prices on Day One of his presidency. Then he did the opposite and jacked up tariffs worldwide. Trump has also been trying to end the independence of the Federal Reserve by pressuring its chairman to lower interest rates. Low rates are ideal, but the Federal Reserve was designed by law to be independent so it can do unpopular things like raise rates to check inflation. Biden let the Fed and its chair, Jerome Powell, do just that, and it worked. That may have been a hard point to make in November 2024, but it’s an easier point to make now.  

Trump has eschewed bipartisanship, ramming through his unpopular Medicaid cuts to pay for more tax cuts for the wealthy through the partisan budget reconciliation process, blowing up a bipartisan deal to fund the government through September by clawing back money for foreign aid and public broadcasting on a party-line vote, and breaking the trust needed to readily pass spending bills to keep government open in the next fiscal year. Under the Biden-Harris administration, we had no government shutdowns. Biden signed a slew of bipartisan legislation into law, including major bills regarding infrastructure investment, semiconductor manufacturing, gun safety red flag laws, and postal service reform. When Democrats used budget reconciliation to pass legislation without Republicans, it wasn’t to deny people health care but to make health coverage and renewable energy more affordable. 

Of course, for future elections, Democrats should primarily talk about the future, not the past. But when you have a good record, you should leverage it to burnish the credibility of your forward-looking ideas.  

Democrats have an odd history of throwing out the good with the bad regarding their presidencies. During his 2000 presidential bid, Vice President Al Gore felt he had to keep some distance from President Bill Clinton in the wake of the latter’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. But he probably overcompensated when he told the nation at the Democratic National Convention, “This election is not an award for past performance.”  

In 2020, Biden tightly embraced his former running mate Barack Obama to get through the primaries. But once in office, he and his top aides bizarrely swallowed the argument that Obama’s two-term presidency was too timid and compromising, despite its many successes. Instead, Biden’s initial legislative strategy essentially involved uncompromising party-line bills using budget reconciliation. This led to the Build Back Better bust and the failure to find the votes that could have kept the expanded child tax credit for more than one year, effectively yanking back money from working-class families. He was able to pass the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, snubbing an offer from moderate Republicans for a smaller pandemic relief package, but then Republicans used the high price tag to blame Biden for high inflation. 

Some disparaged the Obama-Biden legislative record because it wasn’t enough to prevent Trump’s election, similar to how the Biden-Harris legislative record (vastly improved once Biden returned to bipartisanship) has been eclipsed by anger over the 46^th president’s decision to run again and the refusal to stop him by those closest to him.  

However, just because voters can be cranky toward the party in power at the end of a presidency doesn’t mean they won’t become more appreciative with time. 

Why look to the past at all? Because Democrats have a story to tell that’s relevant to the future. Time and time again, Republican presidents leave behind economic messes, and Democratic presidents clean them up.   

Explaining that Biden helped execute a recession-less “soft landing” for an economy upended by the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to a robust relief package and a hands-off approach to the Federal Reserve, was difficult in the wake of an inflation spike. But with Trump breaking his promise to lower prices with a tariff frenzy, and disrupting the labor market with mass deportations, the benefits of the Democratic approach are clearer to see. 

Similarly, with growth a little sluggish in 2016, it was hard for Democrats to make the case that Obama’s infrastructure investments, clean energy investments, health coverage expansion, and financial market rules helped right the economic ship after George W. Bush’s deregulation agenda led to the Great Recession. With the Lewinsky affair dominating the discourse in 2000, it was hard for Democrats to talk about how Clinton’s progressive taxation helped create a budget surplus, lowering interest rates and fueling an economic boom. All of this can be articulated now to show that Democrats have long been the party that takes governing seriously and the party Americans can trust when Republicans take the economy off the rails.  

Democrats are now in the familiar position of casting about for a charismatic savior, which is always great to have but not always available and not something that can be manufactured. A better use of time and energy from Democrats is reminding voters that their party has a long and deep track record of economic repair that will likely come in handy after four more years of Trumpian madness.