In all the talk about whether Joe Biden should “step aside,” there hasn’t been enough discussion of the rationale he should present if he does so. So I offered one at New York:
The Democratic Party’s semi-public bickering over what to do with Joe Biden needs to come to an end very soon, lest it turn into a horrific party-rending conflict or a de facto surrender to Donald Trump. While he can technically be pushed out of the nomination, it would be nightmarishly difficult to do so given his virtually unopposed performance in the primaries and the lack of precedent for anything like a forced defenestration of a sitting president. It would also express disloyalty to a brave and dedicated leader. But Biden has already lost the united, confident party he needed to make a comeback. He’s trailing in the polls right now. And even more importantly, his own conduct and fitness for office will command center stage for the rest of the general-election campaign, which is precisely what he cannot afford given his poor job-approval ratings and the sour mood of the electorate.
So Joe needs to go of his own accord, and it needs to happen quickly before Republican and Biden-loyalist claims of a “coup” become all too credible. But it’s obviously a humiliating exercise. So if Biden comes to realize the futility of going forward, what can this proud and stubborn man say that will make him something other than an object of derision or pity?
I have a simple answer: He can tell the truth.
The truth is that Biden’s firm commitment to the pursuit of a second term, despite his advanced age and increased frailty, hardened into inflexible determination when Trump made his own decision to launch an initially unlikely comeback. When Biden took office, Trump was a disgraced insurrectionist whose very defenders in his second impeachment trial mostly denounced his conduct, even as they urged acquittal on technical grounds. The 46th president was in a position to serve one distinguished “transitional” term and retire with a wary eye on his fellow retiree festering in anger and self-righteousness in Mar-a-Lago. But as Trump slowly recovered and eventually reemerged as a more dominant figure than ever in a MAGA-fied Republican Party, Biden became convinced that as the only politician ever to defeat Donald Trump, he had the responsibility to do it again and the ability to remind voters why they rejected the 45th president in 2020.
As this strange election year ripened, Biden had a perfectly plausible strategy for victory based on keeping a steady public focus on Trump’s lawless conduct (including actual crimes), his erratic record, and extremist intentions for a perilous second term. The polls were close and Biden wasn’t very popular, but these surveys also showed a durable majority of the electorate that really didn’t want to return Trump to power, particularly as economic conditions improved and the consequences of Trump’s Supreme Court appointments grew more shockingly apparent each day.
Then came the June 27 debate, and suddenly Biden lost the ability to make the election about Trump. He needs to look into a camera and say just that, and conclude that just as the threat posed by Trump motivated him to run for a second term, the threat posed by Trump now requires that he withdraw so that a successor can make the case he can’t make as he’s become the object of endless speculation about his age and cognitive abilities. Biden does not need to resign the presidency, since his grounds for withdrawing his candidacy are about perceptions and politics rather than any underlying incapacity. Biden would be withdrawing as a weakened candidate, not as a failed president.
For this withdrawal to represent a stabilizing event for his administration and his party, it’s critical that Biden not equivocate or complain, and that he show his mastery of the situation by clearly passing the torch to the vice-president he chose four years ago. For all the talk of an “open convention” being exciting (for pundits) and energizing (for the winner), the last thing Democrats need right now is uncertainty. No matter what the polls show and how badly his old friends want him to succeed, it’s the prospect of 100 days of terror every time Biden makes unscripted remarks that is feeding both elite and rank-and-file sentiment that a change at the top of the ticket is necessary. The fear and confusion needs to end now, and Biden effectively made his choice of a successor when he made Kamala Harris his governing partner. The president needs to reassert his agency now, not look like he is abandoning his party and his country to the winds of fate.
A straightforward and honest admission of why Biden 2024 is coming to an end could go a very long way toward enabling Harris and other Democrats to shift the nation’s gaze back to the ranting old man whose acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention showed that he has not mellowed or moderated at all. Of course Biden wants to solidify and extend his legacy over the next four years. But right now, the clear and present danger is that it will be extinguished altogether. He alone can address that threat, not as a candidate, but as a president and a patriot who recognizes his duty.
I voted for her, but I think Martha Coakley was a terrible choice and a terrible candidate. She was smug, puffed up with a sense of entitlement, unable to articulate her positions clearly or defend them credibly. If she’s the best candidate we can field for a critical seat at a critical time, we should prepare ourselves for another generation or two of kleptocratic crony capitalism under a Republican administration.
Question for Imn2Paine: why is forking over to rich freeloaders OK while taking care of the poor and supporting the middle class is not?
Imn2Paine,
As you stand against our paying to provide for the poor, you might consider that no one chooses to be poor. Contrary to popular opinion, we human beings do not have a free will to be and do as we would like. Our genes (nature) and our past experiences (nurture) completely determine who we are, and what we will or will not do.
If the Mass. race is not about Coakley, it’s also not about health care. It’s more fundamentally about the basic premises upon which we have created our society. One of them, the belief that we humans have the power to freely choose who we will become and what we will thereafter do, is as false as the literal belief in an Adam and Eve, and a Garden of Eden, or the belief in a flat Earth.
It’s unfortunate that so much of politics is predicated upon an aspect of our world that science fully understands (except, of course, those scientists whose religious or philosophical beliefs over-ride their scientific background and reasoning), and the rest of us are almost completely ignorant of.
This is, or course, not the Democrats, or the Republicans, or anyone else’s fault. I’m not sure we can even rightly say its God’s or the universe’s fault. It is just the way our world has come to be at this point in time.
If and when humanity finally overcomes this insidiously harmful notion of free will, you might better understand the logic behind our tending to those least fortunate among us.
By the way, if you’d like to read a good book that explains in clear scientific terms how it is actually unconscious processes that are responsible for EVERY choice we make, you might consider Harvard psychologist Daniel M. Wegner’s 2002, The Illusion of Conscious Will.
BTW
I am a Coakley supporter.
My comment above was relative to the voice of my moderate and conservative (Reagan Democrats) brothers.
I dislike the notion of a Brown victory.
The race is not about Martha Coakley! She may be what the Republican dominated/produced media/frame portrays her to be (common/not dynamic/victory expected), but the voters here are tired of forking out to the less advantaged.
Section 8 is a better deal than working for a living! Illegals do better than or equal to middle income citizens! You want health coverage? …FOR FREE [working folks and income (the “ownership society”) folks alike pay for it]!!!
A better gig for who?
Democrats in Mass. are moderate and don’t want to fork over for freeloaders, which is what may yield.
God help the Democrats!
If Brown wins, Obama and our Democratic Leaders deserve the blame, not Coakley. They should have been much more invested in her campaign from the very beginning. That’s their job.
If Brown wins, Obama and Reid have a simple choice before them; They can allow Republican Senators to filibuster all major legislation during 2010, which is not a choice at all since it would spell disaster for Democratic candidates in both the Senate and the House in November, or they can change the senate rules on filibusters through means as simple as one recently advanced in a New York Times Op-Ed by Tom Geoghegan;
“The president of the Senate, the vice president himself, could issue an opinion from the chair that the filibuster is unconstitutional. Our first vice presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, felt a serious obligation to resolve the ties and tangles of an evenly divided Senate, and they would not have shrunk from such a challenge.”
Or through the strategy Jamie Court described in The Huffington Post;
“Rule 22 of the Senate, governing filibusters, can be changed or eliminated by a simple majority according to the US Supreme Court in U.S. v. Ballin (1892). Senate rules call for 67 to change the cloture rule, but Democrats should be able to rewrite the rules since they control the Rules Committee. Rule 22 can go out the door all together or be modified. Republicans under Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist threatened to blow up the filibuster in 2005 with far fewer numbers.”
Or they could rely on the “Nuclear,” or “Constitutional” option. A 2005 report by Betsy Palmer highlights how this would be done. This strategy would have to wait until the new Congress convenes in 2011, and would therefore represent a retributive rather than a pre-emptive response to Republican obstructionism. Palmer describes it;
“One example of the “constitutional” or “nuclear” option revolves on the argument that, on the first day of a new Congress, Senate rules, including Rule XXII, the cloture rule, do not yet apply, and thus can be changed by majority vote.”
If Coakley wins, Democrats can pass major legislation in 2010. If Brown wins, Republicans have the choice in 2010 of allowing Obama to address our pressing concerns like jobs, education and climate change, or block these efforts and thereby force his and Reid’s hand. If Brown wins and Republicans continue to obstruct the Democratic agenda, Obama and Reid will have every good reason, and no reasonable choice but, to change the filibuster rule.
In fact, it might actually work out better in the long run if Brown wins and the Democrats are then forced to change the filibuster rule.
If Massachusetts voters, having passed health insurance reform for themselves, vote to deny it to the rest of Americans, I won’t be able to think of words bad enough for them.