I totally agree with my colleague The Moose in congratulating Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel for their plain-talk trashing of Hugo Chavez’s latest Bush-bashing incursion into Harlem. This is pretty basic stuff. Yeah, I think Bush has been an unmitigated disaster for our country. Yeah, given the political capital he possessed on September 12, 2001, I think you could make a pretty good case that the debate over Bush’s exact status as one of the worst presidents of the last century is a bit of an insult to the memories of Warren Harding and Richard Nixon. And yeah, I have to remind myself of the dictates of Christian charity in foreswearing hatred of the man and his administration.But still, I do not think Bush’s American detractors need any outside help from the likes of Hugo Chavez. He is, as Pelosi pungently put it, an “everyday thug.” More generally, he’s a guy who would be universally dismissed as just another self-important ex-military caudillo if he wasn’t sitting on top of oil revenues that keep his regime from ruin, and enable him to strut around Manhattan showering goodies on low-income Americans. He’s pretty much Khadafy without the experience.I find it really odd and reprehensible that Markos took issue with Rangel for upbrading Chavez (missing the point, BTW, that Charlie was objecting to Chavez’s extracurricular appearances in Harlem, not his speech at the UN). But I also probably part company with The Moose in rejecting his particular identification of Harry S. Truman with the idea that partisan differences should generally be subordinated to the national interest.As it happens, I’m now re-reading Richard Norton’s Smith’s political biography of Thomas Dewey, whom Truman famously upset in his signature campaign of 1948. It certainly confirms my often-expressed opinion that George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign had an antecedent in 1948 as an incumbent candidacy based on eschewing the political center and pursuing a deliberate polarization of the electorate.Sure, Truman was pre-positioned in the center to some extent via his abandonment by the anti-Cold War “Progressives” backing Henry Wallace, and the anti-civil rights southerners backing Strom Thurmond. And there’s no question he was a resolute anti-communist, or that his overall record in building a post-war edifice of international institutions was worthy of all the praise that Democratic centrists have so often given him.But within those parameters, Truman ran one of the most polarizing campaigns in U.S. political history, suggesting repeatedly that Dewey was a front not only for the restoration of Herbert Hoover’s domestic and foreign policies, but for an actual American fascist movement determined to abolish democracy and impose an oligarchy of wealth. He ran a very Kos-like campaign, and most of the retrospective Republican commentaries concluded that Dewey (who in part was spooked by the conviction that he lost in 1944 by being too negative towards FDR), erred fatally in campaigning on a “national unity” message.On any issue other than foreign condemnations of an American president, nobody would much accuse Nancy Pelosi or Charles Rangel of insufficient partisan zeal. But that’s another example of the true HST legacy: keep the enemies abroad in mind, but domestically, leave no partisan attack behind. You don’t have to completely endorse this formula to recognize it as a template for what George W. Bush did in 2004, and for what Democrats feel driven to do today.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 20: What Biden Should Say If He “Steps Aside”
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.