Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on It’s not a gold star.

I think you’re all being really harsh here.

First, Biden just did an incredibly hard thing. Yes, it was the right thing to do, for his party and the country. Yes, you could say that he was morally obligated to do it. But there are a lot of things that people should do that are really hard to do on a personal level, and a lot of people fail that test. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for one.

Joe Biden spent decades of his life dreaming of being president one day. He gets there, and does a good job, and now he’s being asked to do something that no incumbent president has done since LBJ? And unlike LBJ, who had a mixed record as president — many great accomplishments, but also the escalation in Vietnam — Biden’s actual record as president is quite good and he doesn’t get enough credit for it. It probably doesn’t seem fair to him, and you know what, it probably isn’t in some sense. It wasn’t fair that his first wife and his daughter died in a car crash and he was a single father as a young senator. It wasn’t fair that his son Beau died young. I’ll leave out Hunter because we can argue what responsibility Joe has for how he turned out, but suffice it to say he’s had his share of personal tragedy.

And now you all want to begrudge him a bit of pride in a gracious speech confirming a pretty grand gesture of statemanship? It just strikes me as so, so petty.

Second, bragging about his record and how ordinarily that would merit a second term isn’t just personal pride. Joe Biden bragging about his record is good for Kamala Harris, and therefore the Democratic Party and the country. Harris is going to spend this campaign bragging about Biden’s presidency and running on his record.