“To govern is to choose, however difficult the choices may be.”

—Pierre Mendès France, prime minister of France 1954–’55

If you want to understand where Joe Biden’s presidency went wrong, when his administration stopped looking like Barack Obama’s and started looking like Jimmy Carter’s, you could start with the failure of Build Back Better.

Build Back Better was a sweeping agenda of economic reform on the scale of the New Deal, meant to solidify its author as the “FDR-sized” president he wanted to be.

Dusting the text off now, you can feel that ambition. Across two bills — the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan — it sought to spend over $4 trillion across a decade on transportation, manufacturing and science, home care, clean energy, an expanded child tax credit, tuition-free community college, child care, and much more. It would have been an epochal expansion of government spending and ambition, on par with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

Little of this became law, of course. The bipartisan infrastructure law enacted in 2021 included $250 billion in new transportation spending, less than half of the Jobs Plans’ number; even adding the $72 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act for electric vehicles doesn’t close the gap much. While the Jobs Plan included $1.6 trillion in climate spending, the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate measures are estimated to cost less than half that much. The CHIPS and Science Act passed in 2022 appropriated all of $79 billion to support manufacturing, a far cry from Biden’s $590 billion bid, and largely didn’t appropriate money for science at all. And then there’s the American Families Plan, almost all of which fell by the wayside, not passed by Congress in any form.

That Biden was not able to pass the maximal version of his agenda is not much of an indictment. No president passes everything they want. They have to prioritize, to choose which parts of the agenda are worthy of their political capital and effort and which are not. Immigration activists were furious that Obama didn’t prioritize comprehensive reform in his first term, and unions were mad that he didn’t do the same for labor law. He put health care first, which yielded fruit for him — as it had not for Bill Clinton, whose choice to do the same in 1993 resulted in calamity.

But in both cases, the president and his allies in Congress made a conscious choice, for good or ill. What stands out about Biden is the degree to which he simply refused to choose at all.

From the design of the American Rescue Plan at the beginning of his term, through Build Back Better and the rocky implementation of the measures he was able to pass, Biden’s domestic record is characterized by a refusal to prioritize, a paralyzing fear of pissing off any Democratic faction that too often wound up winning nothing for any of them.

Multiple causes, including his advanced age, conspired to make him the weakest chief executive America has had in decades. He won his nomination in 2020 through a strange primary that left him leery of intra-group conflict. His advisers, a group of courtiers drawn heavily from his own family and longtime Senate aides, shared this distaste for infighting, and were leery of offending the boss. All this was compounded by his temperament and the approach to politics Biden has had his whole career.

The result is a failed presidency that left Biden without much of an enduring domestic policy legacy and made what accomplishments he can claim immensely vulnerable to the Republican trifecta taking over the government he led.

It’s a rather undignified end to the career of one of America’s longest-serving statesmen. One would think that a 44-year veteran of the Senate would do well precisely at the part of the presidency that demands strong leadership over the legislative process — and indeed, that was a major part of Biden’s case for himself in 2020.

But the legislative process that could have shepherded his agenda into law is exactly where Bidenism fell apart.

Failure at conception

Biden’s missteps began at the very beginning, with legislation sometimes billed as a precursor and sometimes as a part of Build Back Better: the American Rescue Plan.

The $1.9 trillion bill, signed into law less than two months after Biden’s inauguration, was in some ways a triumph. It was markedly larger than the 2009 stimulus passed by his former boss. Whereas Obama’s stimulus proved inadequate to the task of returning employment to pre-financial crisis levels, Biden’s stimulus succeeded in bringing down unemployment incredibly rapidly, returning

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