Biden Is Still There

Life is a few perfect moments with the waiting in between. If you’re lucky, you’ll know when they’re happening.

With minimal fanfare in the transition-obsessed American press, President Joe Biden this week traveled to South America for the G20 meeting in Brazil. He met with Xi Jinping—more on this anon—and Brazil’s President Lula and some other grandees besides. But it was the singular video that went out over American airwaves and through the internet last Sunday that will be remembered as Biden’s perfect moment. 

Standing at an incongruous lectern in a clearing in the Amazon rainforest in an incongruous safari shirt and the inevitable RayBans, he delivered the usual sort of boring remarks on the environment and international cooperation, all the uplifting Al Gore stuff of 20 years ago. It was, as these things go, one of his better speeches—evenly paced and toned, with few of the characteristic missteps that this summer ended his political life. It was suffused with a sadness; he made gestures at his legacy, noting that he was the first American president to visit the rainforest and saying, without apparent rancor, that his successor would find in January a firm cooperative foundation for continuing environmental progress.

That is when the perfect moment came. What was so curious about it was that it was something we have all seen a hundred times—Biden stepping back from the lectern, turning, and walking in a broad arc to exit stage left—but instead stepping through the familiar door amid the McMansionesque splendor of the White House and the hubbub of reporters, he appeared to melt into the thick vegetation of the primeval jungle. The shouted questions of the press were interspersed with the frantic rattle of maracas. 

My learned friend Nic Rowan wrote in these pages that Biden is a sort of temporary king, a transitional figure by his own admission. Who could see the leader of the free world—greatly aged, expressionless, and alone—disappearing into the green shadows and not think of Frazer’s King of the Wood?

Many and important things were done in Biden’s name this past week; he was even there in person for some of them. Even as he was bushwhacking in Manaus, the White House authorized the Ukrainian use of American long-range missiles against targets in Russian territory, which inspired ominous retaliation. In Rio de Janeiro, he met with Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum, where, according to the press readout, they discussed “maintaining cooperation on migration, security and tackling the scourge of transnational criminal violence, and economic issues.” In Lima, he met with Xi and held a joint press conference, where each leader emphasized his commitments to avoiding conflict between the world’s two remaining superpowers while underlining their differences of opinion on one another’s conduct. 

At this appearance, the elegiac, passive mode again took Biden, a strange contrast to Xi’s understated preciseness. His remarks emphasized place and conversation; one might almost say scene and dialogue. He spoke like someone describing a home video.

“Let me close with this.  We—I think—and I once had to count up the number of hours you and I spent alone together. I remember being on the Tibetan Plateau with you and I remember being in Beijing.  I remember—all over the world.  And—both as my—first as vice president, then as president,” Biden said. “We haven’t always agreed, but our conversations have always been candid and always been frank.  We have never kidded one another.  We’ve been level with one another.  And I think that’s vital.”

It is documented that Biden, as vice president, was frustrated to find himself always a spectator. He came to the White House with his heart set on action. It is now clear that, when he said that he intended to be a transitional president, he did not mean a mere transition between the administrations of others, or between two seasons on the tempestuous seas of American politics. He meant a transition between two historical epochs; he meant that he was, like Franklin Roosevelt, going to rebuild America for a new modernity. It was an expression not of humility, but of ambition, maybe even mad ambition. 

Yet for much of his presidency—it is difficult to say how much—he seems to have again been a spectator, swept along by the machinations of administrators and palace factions, deposed and forgotten by his own partisans. His heroic policies—rural broadband! vehicle fleet electrification! the war in Ukraine!—have failed to bear fruit and, worse, have played merry hell with what Americans actually care about, the value of the dollar. No wonder he is waxing epilogic, sifting through what has happened these last four years, trying to pick out memorials and perfect moments for the scrapbook. He must remember what dreams he dreamed. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”—fine. But what if no one remembers the legend?

Life is a few perfect moments with the waiting in between. If you’re lucky, you’ll know when they’re happening. Did Joe Biden, the president of the United States, walking off the world’s stage into Brazil’s tropical oblivion, know that his perfect moment had come?