END OF AN ERA: President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., the 46th president of the United States concludes his term with numerous victories. PHOTO COURTESY OF FACEBOOK

Joe Biden’s exit from the White House on Tuesday will mark the end not only of his presidency but also of a remarkable 55-year career that started with his election to the New Castle County Council in Delaware in 1970 and the U.S. Senate two years later.

His relationship with segregationist Southern Democrats in the 1970s has haunted him all those years. They included segregationists James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman E. Talmadge or Georgia. Eastland once declared that “the white race is a superior race” and used a racist slur to de- scribe the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

"Even in the days when I got there, the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists. You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them. Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked,” Biden once said.

Biden has also been criticized for his relationship with more recent segregationist Sens. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Jesse Helms of North Carolina, as well as Gov. George Wallace of Alabama.

Biden also opposed school busing, for which Kamala Harris, whom he eventually selected as his running mate, roundly criticized him during a presidential debate.

Biden also supported the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which President Bill Clinton signed. The measure provided for 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion for prisons and $6.1 billion for crimeprevention programs. But, whatever the intention, the result was mass incarceration of African Americans – a legacy which still haunts the community.

He has most recently described the anti-crime bill as something “from a different era, while arguing that elements of it were wrongly implemented,” The Guardian reported. But he has conceded that his support had been a mistake because “of what the states did locally.”

Biden has also expressed regret over his role in Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearing in October 1991 by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he chaired. The concern was over the way the committee treated key witness Anita Hill, who had worked with Thomas and whom she accused of sexual harassment. The committee comprising only European American men grilled Hill “in excruciatingly graphic detail,” the New York Times reported.

As Biden campaigned for the presidency in 2020, he called Hill to express “regret for what she endured,” The Times reported. Hill “declined to characterize Mr. Biden’s words to her as an apology and said she was not convinced that he has taken full responsibility for his conduct at the hearings — or for the harm he caused other victims of sexual harassment and gender violence.”

Thomas, seen as replacement for Marshall in what was evidently regarded as the one African American slot on the nine-member court, complained that the committee was subjecting him to “high-tech lynching.” He has gone on to become the court’s most conservative member, voting against almost all cases pertaining to Africa American advancement.

Most recently, Biden immediately announced unwavering support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brutal revenge assault on the Palestine enclave of Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’ invasion of the Jewish state on Oct. 7, 2023, in which 1,139 Israelis were killed and about 200 taken captive. Some reports have said more than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed do far but the Lancet medical journal has put the number at more than 64,000.

Biden’s stance has been in sharp contrast to that of the late President Jimmy Carter, whom he eulogized on January 6 during his state funeral. Carter, who died on Dec. 29, 2024, at age 100, brokered the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. But he wrote a book which he titled “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” published in 2006, 26 years later, and was widely denounced as anti-semitic for likening Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands to the racist apartheid regime that ruled South Africa for 46 years, ending in 1994.

Months later, Carter told the British newspaper The Observer, “The word is the most accurate available to describe Palestine. Apartheid is when two different people live in the same land, and they are forcibly segregated, and one dominates or persecutes the other. That’s what’s happening in Palestine: so the word is very, very accurate. It’s used widely, and every day, in Israel.”

Biden, of course, knows about grief, his first wife Neilia, 30, and daughter Naomi, 1, having been killed in a road accident in 1972. If opponents of Israel’s assault on Gaza hoped the empathy which grew out of that tragedy would inform his attitude towards Palestinians, it did not happen.

Then there is the other side of Biden, who served eight years as Vice-President under President Barack Obama. His White House was commended for hiring “the most diverse staff in U.S. history,” NBC News reported in 2023, “with nearly 50 percent of current appointees identifying as racially or ethnically diverse.”

He championed big-ticket policies, including the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to speed up COVID-10 vaccination and cut child poverty with a $3.9 billion childcare relief package, help the unemployed, provide aid to working families, ensure state and local governments could keep providing needed services and provide resources to schools.

Another major victory was a $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment plan. The White House said Biden “worked across the aisle to deliver what decades of presidents promised and failed to do: rebuild our nation’s roads and bridges, upgrade our public transit, clean up pollution, and provide high-speed internet to every American.”

A $300 billion Inflation Reduction plan is intended “to bring down costs for families, lower prescription drug prices, and make historic investments in American clean energy jobs and manufacturing.”

And a $280 billion Chips and Science plan is intended to “bring back manufacturing from overseas and create good-paying union jobs here at home.” The White House announced that since Biden signed this bill, “companies have already announced almost $300 billion in new American manufacturing investments.”

Much more could have been achieved in those financial packages but the measures were blocked or diluted by Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kristen Sinema of Arizona. The Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, frequently rejected several Biden initiatives.

Biden has also taken substantial measures to combat climate change and gun violence, promote health care for low-income people and for veterans affected by burning pit pollution, marriage equality, better policing and student debt relief.

It is obvious that much of this did not connect with voters, who picked Trump for a second term over Harris – or they did not care. It is evident also that the Harris campaign’s focus on democracy was not well received. Perhaps the campaign would have made a better argument if it had embraced Jim Carvelle’s 1992 exhortation, “It’s the economy, stupid.” While the campaign was hamstrung by inflation, Harris had a lot to show that she and Biden had done much economically and she should have set out those accomplishments in detail and point out that they had laid the groundwork for major projects that will take time to come online.

Those multi-billion-dollar projects will still happen and, ironically, it is Trump and the vast majority of his supporters who will benefit – that is, unless the incoming President decides to eliminate at least some of them. “Trillions of dollars’ worth of tax cuts that Trump passed during his [first] Presidential term will expire at the end of next year” and “he will very likely try to extend them, and that will constrict what the government can do,” Nicholas Lemann wrote in The New Yorker, adding that, anyhow, the BIdenomics package, as it is sometimes called, “is designed to be difficult to repeal. … The money is legally committed.”

Of course, Trump, if he chooses to repeal those measures, can still continue to do what, according to stories that circulated in the late 1800s and early 1900s, some farmers in the Catskill in New York did: put sunglasses on cattle to make them think the grass is green.