“When Joe Biden left office in January, he sought to follow the template set by his predecessors for a post-presidency: Raise funds for a library, deliver a memoir and hit the speaking circuit,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Instead, he has been derailed by a battle to salvage his tarnished legacy—and an urgent fight against stage-4 prostate cancer that kills most men within five years. A stream of new books detailing the extent of his decline while in office and the efforts to conceal it has spawned a fresh round of recriminations over the 82-year-old’s presidency.”

“Joe Biden is in reputation management mode, hiring a veteran campaign and communications strategist to help burnish his legacy at a time when many in his party want him to exit the stage,” Politico reports.

“In a sign of Biden’s intent to remain engaged publicly, his inner circle tapped Chris Meagher, a former Biden deputy press secretary and Defense Department spokesperson, to help him transition past the first 100 days of the Trump administration.”

“Former president George W. Bush is not expected to attend a Thursday event at the White House honoring his late mother,” the Washington Post reports.

“First lady Melania Trump is hosting the event in the East Room, where she will unveil a postage stamp honoring former first lady Barbara Bush, the wife of President George H.W. Bush. Other Bush family members and friends are expected to attend.”

“In a scathing new essay on what went wrong with Biden-era economic policy, longtime Democratic economic adviser Jason Furman argues that the last administration was too quick to toss aside traditional economic orthodoxy around fiscal policy and other issues,” Axios reports.

“Furman, writing in Foreign Affairs, argues that the Biden administration’s willingness to run the economy hot — to risk higher inflation in exchange for a turbo-charged rebound from the pandemic — turned out to be a bad bet.”

“That makes him look very guilty.”

— President Trump, quoted by The Hill, on former President Biden pardoning his family in the final 20 minutes of his term.

“President Joe Biden said a key regret of his four years in office was not taking more credit — and reminding voters — of his administration’s accomplishments, including infrastructure and Covid relief spending,” CNN reports.

Said Biden: “The mistake we made was — I think I made — was not getting our allies to acknowledge that the Democrats did this. So, for example, building a new billion-dollar bridge over the river, we’ll call it the ‘Democratic Bridge,’ figuratively speaking.”

He added: “Talk about who put it together. Let people know that this was something the Democrats did, that it was done by the party. That’s different than me writing a check and me signing a check and saying I did it.”

A new AP-NORC poll finds that “as Joe Biden prepares to leave office, Americans have a dimmer view of his presidency than they did at the end of Donald Trump’s first term or Barack Obama’s second.”

“Around one-quarter of U.S. adults said Biden was a ‘good’ or ‘great’ president, with less than 1 in 10 saying he was ‘great.'”

“It’s a stark illustration of how tarnished Biden’s legacy has become, with many members of his own party seeing his Democratic presidency as merely mediocre.”

“Expect the White House to tout a new milestone on Monday: $1 trillion of private sector money put toward clean technology and manufacturing — investments officials say are a result of Biden-era legislation,” Axios reports.

Matthew Yglesias: “The wheels fell off Bushism relatively rapidly after its triumphant reelection, but the period between Bush’s inauguration and the 2006 midterms is a striking and important one.”

“It’s the only time since Reagan that the conservative movement was truly governing the country. It also falls into a weird kind of gap where the Bush presidency is too recent to be history but too distant to be vividly remembered by many. And I think it’s worth taking a look back and trying to genuinely assess his administration’s major initiatives.”

Jordan Heller has an oral history of when shoes were thrown at President George W. Bush during a press conference in Iraq.

Two former CIA officials told Insider that the George W. Bush administration misrepresented intelligence to assert a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

In fact, the evidence assembled by the CIA suggested that no such connection existed.

NBC News: “This is also the story, unknown to many Americans, of how Bush — a devoutly religious man who campaigned for president on a platform of ‘compassionate conservatism,’ but whose legacy was stained by the carnage of the Iraq War and the Afghanistan quagmire — conceived of and launched a juggernaut aid program that is widely credited with saving sub-Saharan Africa from cataclysm.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney never apologized to Harry Whittington — who died yesterday — for shooting him in the face while hunting, the Washington Post reports.

Texas Monthly: “A status akin to royalty had coalesced in Texas, and the family set up shop—twice—in the White House. Then, as a harsher style of politics gained favor, it all fell apart. Today, a future Bush dynasty looks even more unlikely than it did fifty years ago.”

Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, who later became a Washington Post columnist and vocal critic of Donald Trump, died of cancer at age 58, the Washington Post reports.

Gerson was a truly beautiful writer. His essay on dropping off his son at college is particularly memorable, especially this line: “He has a wonderful future in which my part naturally diminishes. I have no possible future that is better without him close.”