In less than a week, Joe Biden will no longer be president. After five decades in elective office, Biden will go home, unappreciated and undervalued.

It’s happened before. Competence, balance and good judgment are qualities rarely rewarded by the American political system, and even less so since the launch of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

One-term presidents are by definition unsuccessful, and Biden’s campaign for reelection gave out last July, ousted by his own party’s influencers for what turned out to an ill-defined successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, who never settled on any clear campaign themes, unlike her emboldened opponents.

The conventional analysis is that Biden would have lost by a wider margin than Harris; obviously, we’ll never know. But Biden had an advantage no other Democrat has had in decades — the strong support of labor unions, which though diminished still know how to get out the vote.

Had Biden managed to carry three “blue wall” states where unions still have clout — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — he would have won the electoral vote even if he lost the popular vote as well as the “purple” states he carried in 2020.

Trump won all three by less than 2%, winning the popular vote by just two million. Biden won by seven million in 2020, and even Hillary Clinton won three million more votes than Trump in 2016.

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Now we begin to see Biden in the rear-view mirror, and it will take time to render an accurate assessment.

We can still say, as I observed after his withdrawal, that he led the way out of the pandemic, returned competence to the federal government, and restored America’s world leadership — all major achievements.

He did more than that. With assistance from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, the inflation that struck everywhere after the pandemic was subdued without a universally predicted recession, with wage gains for those who need them most — those at the bottom of the scale.

His rebuilding of the NATO alliance after Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine — and its enlargement to include Sweden and Finland — was masterful, and may even survive another four years of Trump’s fecklessness; he’s been notably quiet on that subject.

Perhaps most important was Biden’s recasting of the American economy in the interests of workers. No more unthinking off-shoring of jobs and industries in service to a global free market that has never existed, and never will.

Industrial policy has returned, and here there’s some overlap between the two presidents, though Trump’s version will be chaotic, at least at the outset.

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Biden also made an impressive down payment on America’s failing infrastructure, though we still have a long way to go to match our economic competitors.

His flaws include misjudging the tide of immigrants that would follow reversal of Trump’s first term policies. He was also unable to stem the juggernaut launched by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the Victor Orban of the Middle East — who used the response to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks to rain destruction from the skies on defenseless Palestinians and achieve military dominance throughout the region.

Biden never fit the Washington elite’s idea of presidential. His speech impediment, inability to dominate the airwaves and cyberspace, and reluctance to fight fire with fire made him unsuitable for our hyper-competitive times, where winning seems to be the only thing that matters.

Still, we seem to have entered a four-year presidential spin cycle even more discombobulating than the eight-year cycle that began when Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952. Stability seems a distant dream.

So Biden’s successes can still provide a model once voters tire of the plutocratic excesses already on display.

In time, he may come to be appreciated much like the 20th century president he most resembles, Democrat Harry Truman. When Truman left office, his approval numbers had plummeted to levels matched only by two Republican presidents, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.

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Truman followed the century’s greatest president, Franklin Roosevelt, was blamed for “losing” China, and faced a rising tide of McCarthyism as the Cold War began. Yet today, Truman ranks regularly in the top 10 among presidential historians.

Truman was “give ‘em hell Harry,” which is not Joe Biden’s style. Yet his support of the American worker and resistance to predatory capitalism is similar, and will wear well.

As we are all too aware, American history is being rewritten almost daily, and what impressions will last when things at last settle down is impossible to say.

Biden’s modesty, his careful attention to governing and his ability to span generations of political discourse may still earn the gratitude largely denied him while he served his country and its people.

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