‘They Brought Almost Nothing New With Them’: Washington Ponders Biden’s DC Legacy

For better or worse, the Washington village tends to understand its own history through the prism of presidencies.

“At five o’clock, when the library closed, I would come out into the sunlight and heat of the Washington of Franklin Roosevelt,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once wrote , describing his early experience of the capital, where he came to do 19th century historical research but wound up transfixed by the excitement of FDR’s New Deal capital.

Fifty years later, and on the other side of the political spectrum, Peggy Noonan experienced a similarly president-centric city: “We came to Washington because of him,” she wrote in her memoir of young conservative dazzlement in Reagan-revolution D.C . “He moved us. We loved him.”

Like park rangers contemplating the rings on a tree trunk, old-timers talk about the Georgetown smart-set cosmopolitanism of the Roosevelt years or the suburban federal-contracting opulence of the Reagan presidency. Social-scene veterans detail how JFK upended the dress code, LBJ prompted hostesses to start serving barbecue, and the Clintonites turned Bombay Club into a dining hotspot. It’s not so different from the way archaeologists distinguish the paleolithic era from the mesolithic.

When it comes to the capital’s current moment, this presents a problem: Just what the heck was the Joe Biden era?

The 46th president’s admirers have spent the week crowing about how significant his single term has been for the whole country. But on the more parochial question that obsesses this particular city, few people can point to much legacy for the way the capital lives, works and plays. “They brought almost nothing new with them,” says Sally Quinn, the writer and longtime convener of the city’s power class. “Except calm.”

Unlike predecessors, Biden didn’t introduce Washington to any freshly arrived dramatis personae a la Jimmy Carter’s “Georgia Mafia.” His White House didn’t kick start any lifestyle trends the way the Obamas did with its Michael Pollan-endorsed veggie garden. His administration wasn’t associated with any particular think tank (the way Ronald Reagan’s team elevated the old Heritage Foundation) or ideological cohort (the way the George W. Bush years were the age of the neocons) or pop-culture archetype (the way the Bill Clinton administration enshrined “the wonk” as a Beltway icon).

In the world of boldface names, Biden’s victorious campaign never enshrined a new hotshot strategist to follow in the media footsteps of James Carville, Karl Rove and David Plouffe. His subsequent stumbles didn’t elevate a new cadre of star reporters the way Richard Nixon’s scandals did with the likes of Woodward and Bernstein. In fact, it was the first administration in 44 years without a Bob Woodward tell-all. Tellingly, the revelation that doomed Biden’s re-election wasn’t delivered via holy-shit scoop from a journalist destined for Washington-legend status; despite an array of underappreciated reports, the effects of his age were only made inescapable by Biden himself at the disastrous June debate.

On the bestseller lists, Biden books didn’t sell . In the souvenir aisle, liberal merch celebrated other heroes . If you wanted to go out on the town, there certainly wasn’t a buzzy in-crowd hangout like the Trump Hotel. About the only neighborhoods his administration put on the map were in Delaware, where the first couple spent a vast number of their weekends .

“Even Kennedy only got 1,000 days but got to define an era,” says Tevi Troy, a presidential historian and longtime chronicler of Washington’s intellectual and cultural trends. “But it is just very hard to define the Biden era.”

It makes for a strange paradox. Biden took office as the most Washington president in decades, a 50-year fixture at insider weddings and funerals, even if he hopped the Amtrak back to Wilmington afterwards. Yet he’ll leave behind a smaller cultural footprint than any president since George H.W. Bush — ironically, the last longtime Beltway hand to win the White House.

The contrast between the two is noteworthy. The elder Bush essentially ran for Ronald Reagan’s third term, presiding over the happy end of the Cold War without engendering either the passionate devotion or the intense fury that attached to his predecessor. Biden, by contrast, ousted Donald Trump from the White House and took over at a time of multiple national crises, just the sort of backdrop that might help a pol put his mark on the capital. So why didn’t it happen?

For one thing, there were the specific circumstances of Biden’s ascent. For at least the first year, the Covid epidemic shut down normal life in the capital. Even a president in the mood to be everywhere wouldn’t have had much chance.

For another, there’s the fact that his term involved so many figures from his predecessor’s government. “Just about every significant person in the Biden administration was in the Obama team,” Troy says. As familiar figures, they didn’t engender a lot of fascination, or strike presidency-obsessed Washington as being part of a specifically Biden cast of characters. (The low starpower of his cabinet can be seen in the fact that the Biden administration may be the first one in which the Secretary of Transportation qualified as a genuine Beltway celeb .)

“We’re seduced to thinking about the individual,” says Steve Clemons, the longtime media-political fixture who just left Semafor to focus on his own events firm. “I’ve thought for a long time presidencies are franchises of people.” And while Clemons says he sees Biden’s inner circle around town “all the time,” that inner circle remains unusually small. The rest of the team isn’t especially defined by their ties to Biden.

Above it all, in ways we may ultimately need historians to sort out, is the age factor. Biden surely came into office with as many cronies as any other backslapping pol. But because he was 78, many of his peers were actually no longer in the job market, depriving him an opportunity to launch a Friends of Joe generation of power brokers.

More troublingly, Biden’s age — and the desire to limit public interactions — likely explains the low profile and impossibly tight inner circle that defined his administration. In a city that rates presidents’ impact by their command of the public conversation, and evaluates their legacies in part by how many former proteges are still in the game decades later, this structure inevitably lessened any sense that the administration was shaping the hometown (even if it seemed like an effective way to run this particular presidency).

What’s not clear, though, is whether a light capital footprint is actually a bad thing.

As a native Washingtonian, I’ve always found it a bit embarrassing to watch the civic elite take food, fashion and real estate cues from schlubs who’ve done nothing more than win an election. It’s unbecoming of the world capital the city claims to be.

Rather than evidence of feebleness or ineptitude, Biden’s limited impact on company-town D.C. is also the result of a number of intentional choices, some of them pretty sensible.

Biden’s theory of the case in 2020 was that Americans wanted to not have to think too much about who was president. After four successive presidents who served as lifestyle icons and lightning rods, he would be boring . To this way of looking at the world, the lack of Biden bestsellers was a good thing, since most hot White House books depict chaos and grievance. The absence of a Biden dining trend or A-list neighborhood or au courant artist was good because people might like a normie with unspectacular tastes.

Washington might call him a man out of time, but the country, they figured, would appreciate that.

Similarly, the lack of an era-defining Biden-appointee archetype — like Kennedy’s Harvard Yard whiz kids, or Clinton’s hyper-networked boomers — was a side effect of something the administration rightly viewed with pride: a professionalized HR apparatus that yielded a remarkably diverse cast of junior hires. This meant, of course, that this cohort never became the sort of sociologically classifiable group that, years later, might star in gushy memoirs like Schlesinger’s or Noonan’s. Team Biden saw this as a feature, not a bug.

Did it make governing easier? It’s a mixed bag. That non-elitist hiring process, for instance, yielded a White House intern corps that was less reliant on Joe superfans or cronies’ children. Those ethically-sourced interns promptly rewarded Biden by signing an embarrassing public letter whining about his Israel policy . When things got hot, a Washington with fewer Biden-specific loyalists proved a lot more willing to give POTUS the shove.

Yet it’s also easy to forget how radical it seemed, after the fury of the Trump term and the violence of Jan. 6, to have a president who wanted to simply hit the stations of the cross on Washington’s social calendar. “Everybody in town was hysterical,” Quinn says. “I mean, people were just tearing their hair out and desperate. And then they came in and suddenly all the January 6 stuff just kind of went away.”

“After four years of Trump, Biden brought back a reminder of how leadership and a team acquits itself with decency and loyalty,” says Juleanna Glover, a former Republican consultant and longtime connector of Washington insiders. “Especially from a generational perspective, where you have young people coming to the city all the time, you had a clear contrast of what it meant to work for Biden versus what it meant to work for Matt Gaetz. You’re inculcating future operatives with values that they’ll operate with in the future.”

The flip side of that discipline is the sense that Biden’s team managed to chill conversation about what turned out to be the defining reelection issue. It’s a legacy that will live as an object lesson in newsrooms, and a rallying cry for those who see the capital as a self-protecting liberal ecosystem.

The Washington communications maven Tammy Haddad notes that Biden staged the first White House wedding in years and showed up at Cafe Milano. It was normal and unspectacular stuff, a big break from the status quo under his predecessor. “In a way he gave permission for the rest of the community to engage with the city again,” she says. But because it wasn’t a new thing, it wasn’t going to go down as a Biden innovation, or even seem newsworthy once memories of the chaos faded.

“In his mind, what he was doing was just the regular order of the presidency,” says Franklin Foer, whose book-length account of the Biden White House was one of the rare Biden books to crack the bestseller list. In Foer’s book, this regular order yielded a string of surprisingly ambitious proposals and unlikely legislative successes for a president whose party enjoyed the puniest of Congressional majorities — something that’s being noted this week by Biden’s allies (as well as by fellow Democrats heaping praise to cover up their role in his exit).

Yet when it comes to the question of how Washington works, the true impact of all those return-to-normal vibes in 2021 and 2022 may ultimately involve stuff that didn’t happen.

In the post-Watergate eras of Ford and Carter, the aftermath of trauma led to reforms that permanently altered the way the town’s business gets done. But in the Biden era, proposals to turn shattered Beltway norms into living federal laws mostly came to naught . The GOP fought them, of course. And the Biden administration, focused on doing normal-president things like passing economic measures, had other stuff on its plate, too.

The upshot is that if Trump comes back, there will be no new restraints on his ability to force major change that could upend the way permanent Washington goes about its life. That leaves the capital, once again, looking at a presidential election in panicked, existential terms, worrying that their familiar routines may be swept away. It’s a 21st century variety of abnormal that Biden, the last 20th century statesperson in the White House, never banished.

“If you want to control the age or era designation, the best way to do it is to get reelection,” Troy says.