President Joe Biden has been notably quiet since the Democrats' gut-wrenching defeat at the polls.
After warning voters for years that a Donald Trump win would be calamitous for American democracy, Biden has gone largely silent on his concerns about what lays ahead for America and he has yet to substantively reflect on why Democrats were decisively defeated up and down the ballot.
His only public discussion of the outcome of the election came in a roughly six-minute speech in the Rose Garden two days after the election, when he urged people to 'see each other not as adversaries but as fellow Americans" and to "bring down the temperature." Since then, there's been hardly a public peep - including over the course of Biden's six-day visit to South America that concluded on Tuesday evening. His only public comments during the trip came during brief remarks before meetings with government officials and a climate-related speech during a visit to the Amazon.
At a delicate moment in the U.S. - and for the world - Biden's silence may be leaving a vacuum. But his public reticence has also underscored a new reality America and the rest of the world is already moving on.
"His race is over. His day is done," said David Axelrod, who served as a senior adviser in the Obama-Biden White House. "It's up to a new generation of leaders to chart the path forward, as I'm sure they will."
