He’d had his eyes on the presidency for years. Now it was his, and he wasn’t about to quit. So he raised campaign money, put together a campaign team and hit the campaign trail. He was running for another term and, he was convinced, he was going to win.
A bad night on a debate stage in Atlanta changed everything. Now, just seven weeks later, he will address the opening night of the Democratic National Convention on Monday, not as the party’s presidential nominee but as an outgoing president passing the torch to a potential successor and a new generation.
“This was obviously a bitter pill for Joe Biden to swallow,” said Chris Whipple, author of "The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House."
Yet no matter how painful the past few weeks have been, no matter how heart-wrenching the decision was to drop out of the presidential race, Biden will set aside those feelings, just as he did when he exited the contest last month.
"The defense of democracy is more important than any title,” he said during an Oval Office address to the nation on July 24, explaining his reasons for dropping out.
It was far from the first time he had changed course. During his 50-year political career, Biden’s views on a multitude of issues shifted as times changed, attitudes evolved and Americans developed a deeper understanding of human nature.
But as remarkable as those decisions were, none came close to the monumental impact of his announcement last month that he was ending his campaign for a second term.
On that sunny Sunday afternoon in late July, Biden changed the direction of the presidential race, possibly altered the course of American history and wrote the coda to his career of public service.
On stage at Chicago’s United Center Monday night, he'll talk about what’s at stake in the final weeks of the election and lay out the case for why Americans should get behind the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris , and defeat Republican Donald Trump in November.
“He’ll rise above whatever bitterness there may be,” Whipple said, “and meet the moment.”
President Joe Biden will address the Democratic National Convention, not as a candidate but as an outgoing leader passing the torch to a possible successor and a new generation. SAMUEL CORUM, AFP via Getty Images
'You deal with the world as it is'
Multiple times during his political career, Biden was forced to reconsider his position on a difficult issue as the world changed around him.
In politics, leaders who change their minds or reverse their positions on issues are often sneered at. Critics mock them. Some deride them as “flip-floppers” and accuse them of vote shopping.
Given the possible repercussions, it’s no surprise that Biden’s supporters and longtime colleagues push back strongly against any suggestion that he has altered his views over the course of his career. His core principles have never changed, they insist.
Take abortion , for example. Biden has always been guided by the belief in the right to privacy for women seeking abortions. A devout Roman Catholic, he has long harbored personal misgivings about abortion but has maintained that he would never impose his religious beliefs on other Americans.
“When it comes to abortion and choice, the right to privacy, he's utterly consistent,” said Jeff Peck, who was an aide to Biden through several phases of his political career. “He’s had the same position. He’s not going to impose his faith on other people.”
But Biden’s position on abortion has indeed shifted in some ways over the years.
In 1974, a year after the Supreme Court handed down its landmark Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide, Biden said in a magazine profile that he didn’t believe a woman had a sole right to say what should happen to her body. That same year, however, he also opposed a constitutional amendment banning abortion, saying he didn’t have a right to impose his religious views on others.
In 1982, he sided with Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee and supported an amendment that would have allowed Congress and individual states to adopt laws banning abortion. The amendment passed in the committee but never received a vote on the Senate floor. Biden called the vote the most difficult of his career and again said he wasn’t sure he had the right to impose his views on an issue that would affect the entire nation.
As recently as 2006, Biden said he doesn’t view abortion “as a choice and a right.” But in June 2019, as a candidate for president, he reversed himself and announced he would no longer support the Hyde Amendment , a long-standing law that blocks federal funding for abortion in most cases. After the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade two years ago, Biden, by then president, warned that the decision puts women in danger and began a push to reinstate abortion protections into federal law.
On other issues, Biden’s position has evolved through the years – at times in ways large and small.
At the start of his career, Biden speculated that gay men and women might be a security risk for the nation, and as a senator, he took positions that often mystified and infuriated LGBTQ advocates. But like the rest of the country, his attitudes changed. His stunning endorsement of same-sex marriage in 2012, when he was vice president, was a watershed moment in the push for marriage equality. His evolution on gay rights has been so complete that he is now regarded as the most LGBTQ-friendly president in history .
As a freshman senator, Biden opposed the forced integration of schools through busing, a process in which Black students were brought into schools in white communities in an effort to increase racial diversity. Biden led the Senate push to end the program , saying “I have become convinced that busing is a bankrupt concept.”
Decades later, the move would become an issue in the 2020 presidential campaign and put him under attack from Harris, a political rival who would go on to be his vice president.
As president, though, Biden has taken several steps to benefit Black Americans, including fighting racial discrimination in housing, calling for greater police accountability and pushing legislation to end voter suppression.
As some conservatives argued that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts have gone too far, Biden appointed the first Black woman, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the Supreme Court and celebrated the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that led to the desegregation of schools and became a major catalyst for the civil rights movement.
Biden marked the occasion by inviting some of the families behind the court ruling to the White House. The meeting was private, but Biden said in a proclamation that while the ruling "allowed so many schools to develop diverse, inclusive learning communities that value empathy, kindness, and tolerance, the full potential of Brown v. Board of Education remains unfulfilled."
"There is still so much work to do to ensure that every student has equal access to a quality education and that our school systems fully benefit from the diversity and talent of our students − because diversity has always been one of our nation's greatest strengths," he wrote.
While he was in the Senate, Biden took a tough-on-crime stance and played a key role in passing crime bills that critics say resulted in mass incarceration of Black and brown people and escalated the nation’s spiraling wave of drug crises, from crack to fentanyl. As president, however, he pushed a drug control strategy that focused on untreated addiction and drug trafficking and took steps to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug.
"It’s time we treat addiction like any other disease," he said, speaking as a father whose son, Hunter Biden , had struggled with substance abuse.
Biden’s defenders insist that his shifting positions don’t reflect a seismic change in his core beliefs.
“He has always fought for labor and for workers, always, always, always fighting for labor and the rights of American workers,” Peck said. “He has always been for a fair tax code. He certainly has been consistent when it comes to foreign policy. He's been consistent on the importance of NATO and allies. And on immigration, he has always, for as many years as I go back with him, he has always believed in treating people with dignity and at the same time having a secure border.”
If anything, current and former aides say, Biden’s evolution on some issues has mirrored that of the nation. Fifty years ago, when he took office as a senator, for example, few Americans supported gay and lesbian rights. Today, polls show that more than three-quarters of Americans support LGBTQ+ rights and protections and 69% back same-sex marriage.
Political leaders who have had decades-long careers like Biden must address the issues the country faces at the time but also take into account that, over time, those issues and the public’s understanding of them change, said Ted Kaufman, who was Biden’s chief of staff when he was in the Senate.
In that sense, Biden is no different from other American leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. or Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes – all of whom felt that personal reflection is integral to a life of service.
In Biden's case, "what he has been able to do is what most people do in their lives – and that is, you deal with the world as it is when you're 20,” Kaufman said. “It’s different when you’re 30. It’s different when you’re 40. And it’s different when you’re 50.
"There’s a big difference in a one-term senator changing their position and being someone who has been involved in politics for 50 years. And on almost every major issue, he has had the most consistent principles of anyone in public life.”
His most significant change of heart was still to come.
He had just left office after serving eight years as vice president under Barack Obama . Before that, he had been a senator for 36 years. Still grieving over the death of his oldest son, Beau Biden, two years earlier, he had settled into his post-political life.
White supremacists – chanting racist and antisemitic slogans and carrying weapons, Confederate flags and neo-Nazi symbols – clashed with counterprotesters during a rally in southeastern Virginia in 2017. Dozens of people were injured, and a young woman was killed when a white supremacist rammed his car into the crowd.
Trump, who had succeeded Obama as president, defended the white nationalists. There were, he said at a news conference, “ very fine people on both sides."
Biden, appalled by the white supremacists’ actions and by Trump’s response, has repeatedly cited them as a major reason he decided to run for president four years ago. When he released a video message announcing his campaign, the first words he spoke were “Charlottesville, Virginia.”
With Trump’s defense of the white nationalists, “the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden said. “And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime.”
Biden would win the election, defeating Trump. Four years later, Trump is back as the Republican nominee. With no serious opposition, Biden had been the presumptive Democratic nominee, despite polls showing voters had serious concerns about his advanced age and no real interest in another rematch between him and Trump.
Sagging poll numbers and a dismal performance in a debate with Trump in Atlanta on June 27 did him in. His support collapsed. Campaign donors crashed. A pressure campaign led by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi convinced him the time had come to drop out of the race and pass the torch to Harris, who is now the Democratic nominee.
The decision to quit was “the most difficult decision of his career,” probably even more difficult than his decision to end his first campaign for president in 1987 amid allegations of plagiarism, Whipple said.
“To this day, Joe Biden believes that he could have won this race in 2024, that he would defy the odds and the pundits and the critics one more time,” Whipple said. “What happened, in the end, was that he concluded he could not go forward with his party divided and about to call for him to step down. He saw the writing on the wall, and he made that decision – but not happily.”
And so, here he is, planning to take the stage at the Democratic National Convention on Monday, a leader looking not at his future in politics but at the legacy he will leave behind.
And what, exactly, will that legacy be? Biden’s address Monday night will give some hints at how he views the past four years. A Biden aide said he’s likely to touch on his efforts to rebuild the middle class, to restore America’s standing as the world’s indispensable country, to protect democracy against dictators and tyrants – and to make the case that Harris is the right person continue that unfinished work.
How Biden is remembered will depend to some extent on the outcome of the election. If Harris wins, he will be seen by many as the man who self-sacrificed and saved democracy. If Trump wins, he may be seen by some as the leader who stayed too long, at a great cost to his party and his country.
Either way, it's through the lens of history that legacies are made.
Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on X @mcollinsNEWS.
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