Joe Biden’s announcement Sunday that he was dropping out of the presidential race was the right one for the nation. The president’s cognitive decline became impossible to deny after a 24-day stretch in which he froze repeatedly during a debate with Republican nominee Donald Trump and then followed it up with a series of shaky or worse public performances. Biden’s disturbing habit of losing his train of thought and then saying “anyways” as he tried to what he was talking about was on repeated display last week in his disted speech to the NAA.
Until Sunday, Biden, 81, reportedly rejected the idea that of course he shouldn’t serve as president until he is 86. Biden and his family were described as viewing the doubts about his competence as 1) unjustified panic; 2) a pro-Trump plot; and/or 3) the latest sign of the contempt that Democratic elites have long had for him, exemplified by President Barack Obama backing Hillary Clinton as his successor in 2016.
This denial reflected horribly on Biden. Had it gone on much longer, it would have been seen both as further evidence of his declining state and as a massive stain on his place in history.
Biden’s exit reflects the fact that both the great majority of Democrat rank-and-file voters and top leaders believe he is unlikely to beat Trump in November. This same pragmatism was on display in March 2020, when Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., in the run-up to the crucial South Carolina primary, ed other influential party leaders in backing Biden as the Democratic candidate with the best chance to remove Trump from the White House. That simple framing turned the race into a rout.
Alas for Vice President Kamala Harris, even though Biden endorsed her on Sunday, if that simple framing is again used by Democrats, it hurts her prospects. This is not because of her mixed reputation among political and media insiders, doubts that date back to when she was attorney general of California. It is because of the huge liabilities she has as a key leader of the White House effort to hide Biden’s decline.
In February, two events showed why most Americans were right to worry deeply about Biden’s age. The first came when he declined to do an interview to run during the Super Bowl broadcast, pas the chance to reach tens of millions of voters in the most viewed TV program of the year. In an election year, this was a shocking decision by an incumbent with terrible approval ratings. The second came when special counsel Robert Hur announced he would not bring charges against Biden for improper possession of classified documents after leaving office as vice president because of the unlikelihood that a jury would convict “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” He wrote that in interviews — which were videotaped for posterity — Biden struggled to recall basic details of his own life and career.
In a very telling response, the White House simultaneously blasted Hur as a mendacious, Trump-loving hack and refused to release the interviews which could have helped their case. And who led the deception? Harris. At a meeting with reporters, she said, “the way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and [was] clearly politically motivated.”
The attack ads write themselves. If Democrats want to win, they should consider other options. The names most frequently mentioned include several governors, starting with California’s Gavin Newsom. The difficult optics of ing over Harris, who is of Black and East Asian descent, for a White candidate could be at least partially addressed through a new nominee’s choice of a running mate with a background more like that of Harris.
Of course, one more huge development could scramble this picture: Biden reg before next month’s Democratic convention, making Harris the sitting president and giving her a huge boost in seeking the nomination. Biden’s own staff said last month that he can only be counted on for six productive hours a day. Whatever your politics, that isn’t just ominous to contemplate. It’s completely unacceptable for the president who controls the nuclear launch codes.
