I woke up this morning to a much-appreciated gift from Steve-O-in-NJ, a well-researched, n excellent Inauguration Day prelude post that touches on several issues, but mostly the political history of outgoing POTUS Biden. In that sense, it is also a Comment of the Day on the final installment of the EA inquiry on The Worst President Ever, to which Steve-O already contributed an epic supplement.

Two notes before I hand the metaphorical floor over to Steve: 1) How I love it when there is a Comment of the Day covering ground that I was expecting to have to cover myself on a Sunday morning! 2) I am grateful to AM Golden for asking in a comment about whether Trump has any company as a “businessman,” which I responded to last night and that seems to have prompted Steve’s opus. The quick answer is that nobody on the list of 45 men could be called a businessman/entrepreneur/mogul except Trump. As Steve points out, Harry Truman had a modest haberdashery store [above] before going into politics, but for him to be compared to Trump as a businessman he would have had to own Brooks Brothers and Men’s Warehouse. 3)The survey of Presidential occupations and those of their fathers was a large section of my honors thesis, which could have been called “How to Become President of the United States.” In summarizing the facts, Steve omitted #17, Andrew Johnson, who may have the most astounding background story of all. Johnson is usually referred to as a tailor, but his pre-White House occupation could be arguably called “slave,” as he was an indentured servant who was literally owned until he ran away. It was a cruel twist of fate that his public image, such that he has one at all, is dominated by his disastrous tenure as President when his life story is perhaps the most amazing rise to power in in our history. He also shares with #47 an amazing comeback, being elected to the U.S. Senate as the final act in his public career.

Here is Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day on the post,“Inauguration Prelude Ethics Round-Up, 1/18/25” :

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I actually was looking up how many presidents have been exclusively politicians their entire professional lives, and the number is comparatively few. Most of them have had at least some other profession before entering the world of politics.

Most (31) have been in the military in some capacity at some point, and 12 (Washington, Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Pierce, Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, and of course Eisenhower) have been generals, albeit some “in name only.” Many were lawyers, judges, or bureaucrats, but there were also such diverse jobs as mining engineer, farmer, haberdasher, land surveyor, actor, teacher, executive, and publisher. Arguably Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt might qualify as polymaths, since both could do multiple things well.

Pure politicians, the Presidents who spent their entire professional lives or close to it in elective office, have been relatively few. FDR almost was, but his political career was derailed for a time by the illness that left him wheelchair-bound. LBJ comes close, since he taught only briefly before getting into politics, and left only briefly to serve in the Navy in WW2. JFK definitely was, since he came out of the Navy, spent something like a year and a half as a “special correspondent” for Hearst Newspapers, then ran for the House and never looked back. Bill Clinton has often been described as never having a “real job” outside of politics.

Biden was also pretty much purely a politician. He came out of law school, spent about a year in private practice, then possibly less than a year as a public defender (the history is murky, and he only “rediscovered” it when he needed social justice creds in 2020) before he ran for his first office and never looked back until the four years between being Obama’s vice president and running himself, during which he “wrote” a memoir and was an “honorary professor” at the University of Pennsylvania.

Joe spent most of his life in the House and then the Senate, grinning, flustering people to the point where they gave up trying to convince him of anything and occasionally throwing his weight behind legislation. His first attempt to run for the presidency was derailed by a revelation of plagiarism, and that should have been it, but he just sank back into the Senate, where he was good and entrenched, until Obama tapped him to be VP. As VP he was anything but distinguished, actually telling Obama not to try to eliminate bin Laden because if Operation Neptune’s Spear failed, he would have no one to blame.

Biden was also a hypocrite at best, a moral slug at worst, willing to compromise his principles when he thought it would get him further. For years, even decades, he claimed to be pro-life and touted his Catholicism. He suddenly discovered otherwise when he was running for the big chair. He claimed to be all about law and order and threw his backing behind centrist Clinton’s “Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act,” then went woke and abolitionist when he was running for president and saved almost forty inmates from death who didn’t deserve it. He claimed to be all about advancement and protection of women – and at the same time couldn’t keep his hands or nose to himself. He also may have had some pedophilic urges, there’s plenty of evidence to support that, between photographs showing him acting creepy with young girls and his daughter’s revelation that he showered with her.

I’m also not at all impressed with his stories of personal tragedy or family. What happened to his first wife and toddler daughter was awful, but before too long he was pursuing then-model Jill, who divorced her husband to grab the coattails of a politician who could take her places. I wouldn’t wish what happened to Beau on anyone, but Joe didn’t have to inflate it with lies to try to turn him into a Kennedy-style pawn. Hunter’s history is well-documented, and I won’t go into it here except to say it’s as much a reflection on Joe and Jill’s parenting as on his nature. Then there’s the question of his granddaughter who he had to be essentially forced to recognize, and his late gaffe bringing up his great-grandchild in a press conference that was supposed to be about the disastrous fires in LA.

As for his actual performance as President, there really isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said. You only need to look at the prices when you gas up or go grocery shopping to see what his economic policies did. You only need to read about the Ukraine and Israel to see what his feckless foreign policies did. Don’t kid yourself that he finally brokered a peace between Israel and Hamas. Hamas and Iran only decided they’d better get an agreement in place because Trump was getting closer and closer to returning to the White House and he said what was going to happen if they didn’t stop this, same as Iran decided in 1980 they’d better release the hostages because Reagan was about to take power. I think the fact that his ratings tanked after the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and have never recovered also tells you all you need to know.

The fact is that Joe Biden’s career was built on two things: luck and the ability to paper over failures. It was luck that made him the last candidate except for Bernie Sanders and luck that made Trump a president battling a deadly virus, race riots, the media, and hostile governors all at once. It was the ability to paper over failures that got him in position to run at all. It was papering over failures that enabled him to look semi-competent during a campaign season where he could hide in his basement and during a term that started to unravel really fast after the first year. Then finally, on that stage this past July, his luck ran out and he turned in a performance that couldn’t be papered over. The rest is history. Like Castillon was Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt in reverse, this election season was COVID, George Floyd, and lawfare in reverse, and in not much more than 24 hours Donald Trump will retake power to hopefully finish what he started in 2017.

It didn’t have to be this way. Joe Biden could have kept his promise to be a transitional president and make way for new leadership. He could have kept some other promises, like not to pardon his son. He could have picked a vice-president for competence and not gender and color. He could not have waged lawfare trying to lock his main political adversary up. He could have not called half the country garbage and enemies. Or, better yet, he could have faced up to the fact that his mind was going and not run in 2020, putting his entire party and the entire media in a position where it had to lie for him and cover for him.

Whose fault was all this? An overly proud second wife who was determined to stay the power behind the throne as long as the Constitution allowed? A ne’er-do-well son who knew that without dad protecting him he was just another junkie making excuses for his wasted life? A shadowy group of Deep State apparatchiks determined to hold onto power they were never elected to? A legacy media who long ago stopped being reporters of fact and became advocates for one side? A ruthless political party interested in getting power and keeping it no matter who or what it destroyed to do it?

It may have been all, some, or none of the above. In the end it really is irrelevant, because one man could have stopped all of this by saying no. No, I won’t indulge this. No, I won’t protect someone who doesn’t deserve to be protected. No, I won’t cede power to the unelected. No, I won’t be a party’s conduit to power and pawn in keeping it. More importantly, no, I’m not up to this job now if I ever was, and I know I’ll do more harm than good if I take it. He didn’t say no, though, and we all paid the price.