Joe Biden's legacy after historic decision to give up 2024 reelection campaign

President Joe Biden on Sunday became the first presumptive nominee to give up the nomination at this point in the process, weeks before the convention and months after he had won enough delegates to clinch the nomination.

His presidency began on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, where days before insurrectionists overran the U.S. Capitol, on Jan. 6, 2021.

"We will press forward with speed and urgency," he said in his inaugural speech, "for we have much to do in this winter of peril and possibility."

The day before his inauguration, Mr. Biden marked 400,000 COVID deaths, and less than five weeks later, the toll had risen to half a million. 

"That's more lives lost to this virus than any other nation on Earth," Mr. Biden said. 

Mr. Biden's gesture bore the habitual empathy that has been the hallmark of his political life, an emotive approach fit for the unease of the time.

"To heal, we must remember," he said in marking the 500,000 deaths. "I know it's hard. I promise you, I know it's hard."

The coronavirus pandemic posed an even more difficult challenge than Mr. Biden imagined, as variants and vaccine resistance led to over 700,000 deaths on his watch. During the toughest stretch of his 2024 reelection campaign, the virus sent him into isolation, and its symptoms were the reason he made the surprise announcement that he would not seek a second term on social media, rather than in person. 

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born in 1942, the first pre-baby boom president since 1993. When the economy collapsed in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and his father lost his job, the Biden family moved to Delaware. 

"My dad had an expression," Mr. Biden often said. "He said, Joey, it's not a question of succeeding, whether you get knocked down, it's how quickly you get up."  

The president played football at the University of Delaware and attended law school at Syracuse University.  

In 1972, he ran for the U.S. Senate, as a long-shot tell-it-like-it-is 29-year-old.

"If you like what you see help me out, if you don't, vote for the other fella," he told voters on the campaign trail.

"I think one of the reasons I won is that they have more confidence in me that I will say what I think," Mr. Biden said at the time.

Weeks later, his wife Neilia and year-old daughter Naomi were killed in a traffic accident that also injured his sons, Beau and Hunter. 

"I felt like a piece of me died," Mr. Biden said. He took the oath of office in a hospital.

As a single father and U.S. senator, Mr. Biden commuted from Wilmington to Washington every day to be home with his children at night.

In 1975, he met Jill Jacobs, a teacher, on a blind date, and two years later, they married.

"Everyone knows I love her more than she loves me," he often says.

Mr. Biden first ran for president in 1987, but he dropped out after he was accused of plagiarism. A year later, he suffered two brain aneurysms but would later write that he had no fear of dying.

As chair of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Biden presided over the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas. During the hearings, Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexually harassing her years earlier when they worked together. Her testimony was received with hostility from the panel composed entirely of White men, and Mr. Biden weathered criticism at the time and later for the way she was treated. Thomas has consistently said the charges were untrue. Mr. Biden declared an FBI investigation into the accusations inconclusive.

In 2019, Mr. Biden said, "To this day I regret I couldn't come up with a way to get her the kind of hearing she deserved." Speaking at the Biden Courage awards, Biden said Hill "paid a terrible price" when she testified before a "bunch of white guys."

During his Senate career, one of Mr. Biden's greatest points of pride was the 1994 crime bill, which he drafted. It pushed crime down, but incarceration rates increased. The measure also included a ban on assault weapons. 

He ran again for president in 2008, when Barack Obama won the primary and the presidency. Obama chose him as his running mate, and during two terms, Mr. Biden oversaw stimulus spending and famously got ahead of the president in endorsing gay marriage.

"What this is all about is a simple proposition: who do you love," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in May 2012.

Mr. Biden also advised President Obama to wait for better confirmation before launching the raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Memorably, he also said of the passage of Obamacare, the national health care law, "This is a big f****** deal."  

He's always been known for verbal gaffes. Some were innocent. "We choose truth over facts," he said at the Iowa State Fair in 2019. 

And others were less so.

"They're gonna put y'all back in chains," he told voters in Virginia, referring to the Republican-backed budget.

In 2016, he passed up a presidential run after his son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015. 

In 2020, Mr. Biden's presidential campaign began inauspiciously with distant losses in both Iowa and New Hampshire. But he was able to consolidate support after a decisive victory in South Carolina. 

"To all those who have been knocked down, counted out, left behind, let me say to you: this is your campaign," he declared.

For months, as the pandemic worsened, Mr. Biden stumped virtually — from his basement. "This is a war against this virus," he said.

Mr. Biden made history by picking California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, the first woman of color to be nominated by a major party. 

"Kamala knows how to govern. She knows how to make the hard calls," he said in August 2020. "She's ready to do this job on Day One."

That November, Mr. Biden defeated Donald Trump by 7 million votes. He brushed aside Trump's false claims of fraud and prepared to bring the pandemic under control. In his first 100 days, he accelerated vaccine distribution and strong-armed a $2 trillion COVID relief plan through Congress with slim Democratic majorities. 

Mr. Biden pitched his candidacy as that of a soft-spoken healer, but he governed more progressively than Obama. He has made his presidency a transition between the nation's older, racially calloused past and its softer, youthful and more inclusive future.

He appointed the first Black woman to the Supreme Court — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is his only Supreme Court nominee so far, and he signed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill into law

His presidency was hampered by low approval ratings, an outcome of concerns about high inflation, comparatively lenient border policies and the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. 

Throughout his reelection bid, Mr. Biden fought hard and spent tens of millions just to try to stay even with Trump.  

But a disastrous presidential debate against Trump, in which he struggled with hoarseness, keeping his train of thought and finishing sentences, and failed to effectively refute Trump's false claims, raised immediate doubts among Democrats about his ability to finish another four-year term.

He was unable to stop the erosion of support among lawmakers and top donors, and after defying pressure to drop out for over three weeks, he suddenly announced his exit from the race in a social media post. 

"[W]hile 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," he wrote Sunday afternoon.

Even as president and the presumptive nominee of his party, he saw that the political tides had turned against him. In the end, Mr. Biden was persuaded to preserve his legacy, rather than risk defeat for himself and Democrats nationwide. 

In:
• Joe Biden

Major Garrett

Major Garrett is CBS News' chief Washington correspondent. He's also the host of "The Takeout," a weekly multi-platform interview show on politics, policy and pop culture.

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