If someone titled a film Time Horizon*, we'd expect a cheesy, 1980s-style low-budget and low-tech yawner, with "thoroughly forgettable" as a best-case outcome. If you're trying to explain the legacy of a political figure, "time horizon" is a pretty good way to admit sotto voce that his career was a disaster in the present moment.

And so we come to Jake Sullivan's attempt to polish Joe Biden's legacy, which comes in the middle of a Washington Post effort to do the same. While this attempt came before news of Jimmy Carter's passing, it's clear that Sullivan wants us to believe that history will also credit Biden with the accomplishments of his successors, rather than assess his presidency accurately:

Even some of his closest advisers, without faulting Biden, conceded recently that his style of governing did not always mesh with today’s politics.

“The president has been operating on a time horizon measured in decades, while the political cycle is measured in four years,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said in an interview.

Sullivan added that Biden’s accomplishments by their nature will take a long time to bear fruit. “How to govern at this moment to set the U.S. up for long-term success has one answer, and how to govern to deal with midterm and presidential elections in the very short term might have a different answer,” he said. “The president went with doing the things that really put America in a strong position.”

Ahem. In fact, double ahem. What part of the Kabul Bug-Out "put America in a strong position"? That sent a signal of weakness and fecklessness that rippled all the way to the Donbas and to Gaza, not to mention Tehran, Beijing, and Pyongyang. Biden abandoned 14,000 Americans to the Taliban and billions of materiel to extreme Islamist terrorists in 2021. Two years later, Biden and his gutless wonders insisted on imposing their military advice to Israel while threatening to withhold arms sales; Benjamin Netanyahu was smart enough to recognize defeatism and surrender when he saw and heard it, and ignored Biden.

How about stronger in terms of domestic defense? Biden and his team allowed millions of migrants to swarm unchecked across the southern border after inheriting a stable border from Donald Trump. The resulting flood of migrants exacerbated crime, homelessness, inflation (to which we'll return momentarily), not to mention a national housing crisis. At the same time, Biden and his allies pressed for shifting funds for police to other non-law-enforcement priorities, with some calling for defunding across the board. 

On the economy, Biden eroded the buying power of the working and middle classes in exchange for his global-warming fantasy spending. Despite being warned that a third tranche of stimulus was an idiotic policy in light of supply-chain issues, Biden pushed forward and touched off the worst inflationary wave since Carter. American workers lost ground nearly every quarter of his presidency, while their debt skyrocketed as they struggled to keep up. 

And let's not forget the worst legacy of the Biden presidency, which is the cover-up of Biden's cognitive incapacity for the office. Jake Sullivan will have to answer for that in time, one hopes, as will Kamala Harris and Biden's other advisers with their "sharp as a tack" lies. If the Washington Post was a legitimate news source, it would be asking Sullivan to account for that cover-up rather than provide even more propaganda for a senile failure propped up to disguise the exercise of real power. The "time horizon" on that cover-up began before the Kabul Bug-Out, according to new reporting this month from the Wall Street Journal, and was in place by mid-2021:

Yet a sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden’s advanced age had arisen early on—in just the first few months of his term. Administration officials noticed that the president became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes. 

They issued a directive to some powerful lawmakers and allies seeking one-on-one time: The exchanges should be short and focused, according to people who received the message directly from White House aides. 

Ideally, the meetings would start later in the day, since Biden has never been at his best first thing in the morning, some of the people said. His staff made these adjustments to limit potential missteps by Biden, the people said. The president, known for long and rambling sessions, at times pushed in the opposite direction, wanting or just taking more time.

The White House denied that his schedule has been altered due to his age.

If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.

This is the real Biden legacy -- weakness and incompetence unparalleled in modern American history, combined with a criminal conspiracy and personal corruption capped by the pardon for Hunter Biden. There is no "time horizon" possible that could contextualize that into advancing American interests. In fact, the full-court press of lawfare on his political opponents -- including the use of government pressure to censor on-line dissent -- may have set precedents that will weaken liberty for decades to come. 

Sullivan clearly has the Carter model in mind with this "time horizon" nonsense, but it's an absurd construct. Carter spent more than 40 years as a private citizen, focused on charitable works before pushing fully into the NGO realm in foreign policy. The latter has a mixed legacy at best (which David has dissected in part already), but at least Carter focused on something other than himself. Joe Biden spent what little time he had outside of Washington DC power (and apparently a lot of time while in power too) focusing on selling his influence to foreigners through Hunter and his brothers Frank and Jim, and laundering foreign income from that business through Biden Inc's 20-plus LLCs. 

Besides, Carter's legacy as president is just as poor as it was in 1981 when Ronald Reagan took office. It wasn't corrupt, but it was just as weak and misguided on both foreign and domestic policy. It is Carter's post-presidential work that elevated him in later years, and still not without controversy, especially in playing footsie with Yasser Arafat and later Hamas. Biden has no such claim to charity with his own time and money, only with ours, and mainly for the benefit of his influence-peddling business model. 

That's the Biden legacy. And if there is justice, Sulluvan will be among those who will have to answer for it. 

* - I checked on IMDB, and the title is still available. The closest is Event Horizon, which wasn't too bad in 1997 but was still thoroughly forgettable. Time to suit up Tim Thomerson, David Andrews, and Melanie Griffith!