Biden's legacy: triumphs, heartbreaks and a turbulent finale

For Joe Biden, it has been a long road from Scranton.

Biden's reluctant announcement Sunday that he won't seek a second term in the White House − a decision that throws the Democratic presidential race into uncharted waters − signals the end of one of the longest political careers in American history, one laced with historic achievements and dramatic reversals, heartbreak and drama.

His tenure as the nation's 46th president, the fulfillment of a lifetime aspiration, is likely to rank as one of the most consequential in modern times. He helped navigate a course from the worst pandemic in a century, presided over an against-the-odds economic recovery, united much of the world against Russian expansionism, and made the biggest investment in climate change in history.

But there was a challenge he couldn't conquer: age.

"It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President," he wrote in a letter posted on social media. "And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term."

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Just 10 days ago, in the wake of a disastrous debate against Donald Trump in which he appeared to lose his train of thought, Biden insisted he wasn't staying in the race "for my legacy," but "to complete the job that I started."

But in the end, voices that he couldn't ignore, among them his old ally Nancy Pelosi, focused on protecting his legacy. They argued that continuing the campaign risked making his last chapter in politics leading the Democrats into disaster in November.

With questions about his mental acuity persisting, he could cost Democrats not only the White House but also control of the Senate and its hopes of regaining the House.

That catastrophic coda not only could overshadow his achievements − on creating jobs and spurring growth, on strengthening alliances and investing in infrastructure. It would also make it possible for a reelected DonaldTrump and a Republican-controlled Congress to dismantle many of them.

More:As President Joe Biden steps aside, would America be ready for President Kamala Harris?

From young senator to aging president

When Joseph Robinette Biden was first elected to the Senate at age 30 and skeptics asked about his age, he had a standard response. "Watch me," he would say.

That was the same rejoinder he would use a half-century later, when skeptics asked about his age in an entirely different context.

Few figures in American history have filled as many political roles as he has, from one of the youngest senators ever when he was elected in 1972 to the nation's oldest president at 81. Early on, he was a Democratic centrist on abortion, civil rights and crime. Later, as president, he would enact the most far-reaching progressive agenda since Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society.

As Barack Obama's running mate, he would be a crucial partner in electing the nation's first Black president.

Then, against the predictions of pundits, he won the Democratic presidential nomination himself on his third try, in 2020. Facing a field of contenders a generation younger, he prevailed in his party and then with the country, ousting President Trump in an election that both sides depicted as an existential test of democracy.

In office, despite slender Democratic majorities in Congress, he pursued a strikingly ambitious agenda.

"As great a legislative record as any first-term president since at least FDR," said Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. "Led the country through the bulk of its greatest domestic crisis – COVID – since the Great Depression, and its greatest health crisis since the Spanish flu.  Record-high stock markets and record low unemployment.  Kept the nation out of war despite wars erupting around the world. 

"Oh, and entered office without his predecessor on hand to peacefully hand over power for the first time since Reconstruction, a mark of the divided nation he inherited."

Aides would complain Biden never got credit for the results, including avoiding the recession that most economists had forecast. He suffered setbacks, too, including a disastrous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan that contributed to a sense of a world that was spinning out of control, with U.S. influence on the wane.

The furor over his competence to serve a second term has dented the credit he might otherwise have been able to claim for his first, Engel said. "One fears the tragedy we are witnessing in his refusal to go quietly into retirement increasingly looks like King Lear, in which a nation rips at the threads in order to make an aging leader feel loved, when he already was and should be."

A persona from an earlier era of politics

Biden never lost the persona he forged during an earlier era of politics, one in which compromise across party lines was a rule of the game.

From start to finish, he was Joe from Scranton, often referring to his Pennsylvania roots, mentioning his father even at the NATO news conference this month. Young Biden was an undistinguished student at the University of Delaware and graduated near the bottom of his law school class at Syracuse University.

He would forever have a chip on his shoulder toward Ivy Leaguers, the self-confident members of "the elite" he would decry when he rejected calls for him to withdraw from the Democratic ticket.

He was the guy who had won elections, he would note, starting with the upset when he narrowly defeated an incumbent Republican senator in Delaware.

Never far from the surface were his personal tragedies − from the deaths of his wife and young daughter in a car crash in 1972 to the demise of son Beau in 2015 of a brain tumor thought to be associated with his service in the Iraq war. His surviving son, Hunter, would struggle with drug addiction.

Biden held the Delaware Senate seat through six more elections − a 36-year tenure that would see him chair the Judiciary Committee and then the Foreign Relations Committee − until he moved into the vice president's residence on Observatory Circle in 2009.

But he had defeats, too. He ended his bid for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination in the wake of a furor over plagiarizing a British politician's stump speech. His 2008 bid went nowhere; he finished a humiliating fifth in the opening Iowa caucuses.

In 2020, he lost Iowa, too, then the New Hampshire primary, then the Nevada caucuses. But he won the South Carolina primary, and with that staged a comeback for the Democratic nomination. And, then, the presidential election, running as a uniter in a time of division.

He would carry more than 81 million votes, the most of any presidential candidate in history.

The lessons Biden took from that victory, and from a lifetime of taking a hit and then getting back up, made it harder for him to step back.

"He has seen this over and over again," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters as the debate over whether he should stay at the top of the ticket raged. "People count him out. People say he’s not going to win. People say, you know, all of the negative things that they want to put at his feet, and he proves them wrong over and over again.”

This time, though, he decided that it was time to go. That he had reached the end of the road.