Originally posted October 18, 2022.

In 2020, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, Barack Obama had this to say about Joe Biden, the President’s VP for the past eight years:

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to [expletive] things up.”

Are Americans likely to forget that Joe Biden’s No. 1 achievement, as the WSJ’s William McGurn points out, is a decline in the living standards of the American people?

It didn’t have to be this way. Upon winning the election, Mr. Biden said it was time to “stop treating our opponents as our enemy” and “to rebuild the backbone of the nation—the middle class.” They were exactly the right words and right priorities.

But instead of delivering on them, he has called half of Americans semi-fascists and launched a spending spree designed to reshape America radically. And he did it in part because he wanted to prove to the world (and especially to the Obama people who had always condescended to him) that he would be a more transformational president than his former boss.

How correct Obama’s 2020 assessment of Joe Biden was.