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”m sorry about the reaction against superdelegates, which is really overblown. In 2008, despite all the fooferaw, they ended up voting the way everybody else did, so I really don’t see the problem.
But I’m just old enough to remember the catastrophic election of 1972, and the reason superdelegate positions were created. The public doesn’t like it when the most eminent, the longest-serving, the wisest, the most committed people are shoved rudely aside by insurgents — their positions disrespected, their service disregarded, their views scorned.
When the anti-war movement took over the party under McGovern it should have been energizing, but the way the newbies openly despised and denigrated people who’d been dedicated Democrats for decades, doing so much of the heavy lifting, was disgraceful.
Long-established powerful people can be arrogant, yes, but so can upstarts. Besides, the Democratic Party was not then, and is not now, and is not likely to be tomorrow, a mirror of the top-down hierarchical conservative movement, with its dittoheads and astroturfers. We’re just not in danger of that.
The spectacle of Hubert Humphrey, civil rights hero, father of Medicare, being spoken of so vilely and treated with such disrespect was shocking.
McGovern’s supporters often treated unsympathetic governors and members of Congress as enemies of humanity. That part of humanity that voted for these men and women didn’t always appreciate it. A lot of Americans felt that, when you wipe your ass with a Senator millions of them voted for, you were wiping your ass with millions of voters.
You never want the party to look extreme, unmoored or crazy. You never want it to look too radical or too reckless. The McGovern delegates made it possible for Nixon to portray McGovern credibly as a radical.
The embrace of Jimmy Carter, an outsider, by established Democrats in 1976; the embrace of Barack Obama, an outsider, by established Democrats in 2008: this armored both candidates against the skepticism Americans naturally have toward disruptive change.
The superdelegates were meant to be a brake on a runaway party, yes. If the party is very closely divided, why shouldn’t its elected leaders, its elders and its most distinguished voices not be able to keep it from going off a cliff?
But they were also to keep the party anchored publicly, visibly, to its living traditions, and respectful of its most distinguished members. The position of superdelegate was meant to be an honor. In 2008 the Obama rank-and-file (worried they’d side with Hillary) came very, very close to publicly dishonoring anybody with a superdelegate role. That would have been a big mistake.
It’s great when a 20 year old gets deeply involved, or when a forty year old who has never deigned to become involved suddenly chooses to do so, but neither person should consider himself superior to the one who has been toiling in the trenches for forty years and been instrumental in some of the party’s greatest successes.
The McGovern delegates, many of them, had done nothing for the party up to that point (and would end up doing little of value for it in 1972 either) yet their arrogance and self-righteousness was often breathtaking. One reason we won in 2008 was that, not only did Obama bring new people into the party, but it was not done in such a way that it completely up-ended the party.
The party that year wasn’t simply taken away from everybody who wasn’t an Obama Democrat. It wasn’t re-organized in such a way as to heap scorn on all who came before. People weren’t thrown out of positions for being the wrong gender or the wrong color.
That’s what happened under McGovern, alas. So I’ll be really sorry if we gut the reforms (and they WERE reforms) that undid some of the institutional damage of the McGovern candidacy.
Disagree I may with some of the Democratic Leadership Council’s views, but I never disagreed with the idea that the party shouldn’t be an amalgamation of special interest caucuses (which is what the McGovern people turned it into).
The proof of this wisdom was our comeback in 1976 after the disaster of 1972. I wish we wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater all over again.