Joe Biden Did Not Have the Guts to Get Osama bin Laden

When the time came for a gutsy call, the vice president said ‘don’t go.’

Joe Biden wants to run on Barack Obama’s record. Obama himself, speaking at the Democratic convention last month, glossed over Biden’s own record while reassuring listeners of Biden’s value as a wing man: “For eight years, Joe was the last one in the room whenever I faced a big decision.”

The single best moment of Obama’s presidency was the May 2011 raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. It only happened because Obama ignored Joe Biden when he said, “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go.” Biden is all too aware that he got the biggest decision of the Obama presidency wrong, which is why he changed his story years later to claim that he had actually supported the raid. That history is important to remember today, on the 19th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, as Biden seeks to become the next commander in chief.

Biden has four main reasons for embracing Obama’s record rather than his own. One, Obama won two national elections and remains popular with Democrats. Two, the rest of Biden’s career is as a legislator, so his years as vice president are important to evaluating how he would handle an executive job. Three, as David Harsanyi has detailed, many of Biden’s own legislative stances are now sufficiently unpopular with Democratic activists that Biden has felt compelled to renounce them. And four, the tasks Biden handled himself as vice president, ranging from overseeing “shovel-ready” stimulus projects to dealing with Ukraine, are a morass of ineptitude, favoritism, and sleaze that Biden would rather avoid. So why not run on the best thing Obama ever did?

Killing Osama bin Laden, who had evaded American justice and retribution for nearly a decade after September 11, 2001, was a big deal, and a big factor in Obama’s re-election a year and a half later. It was cheered, and justly so, by Republicans as well as Democrats across the country. It made Obama look strong and successful compared with the years of fruitless search by George W. Bush, and helped distract from the many foreign-policy areas in which Obama was weak and timid in standing up to bad actors. Biden himself famously turned it into a pithy campaign-trail slogan he repeated across the American heartland: “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive!”