Bye Bye Biden
Well, that was crazy.
This week has been the longest year of my life. There will be books written about it and it alone. It is an 8-day span unlike possibly any other in our nearly 250 years of national history.
We have seen the state of the nation and the presidential race shift wildly in multiple directions, driven by truly epochal events. In just over a week, one major party nominee came within inches of assassination while the other unceremoniously quit the race, less than a month before his party’s nominating convention and a mere 106 days in advance of the November election (and early voting starts in September in some states!). In the middle of those absurdly historic happenings was the Republican National Convention, which has its share of major moments – including saying a lot about the future of the Grand Old Party and American conservatism. But the kicker on this history-making week-plus was the news today – delivered by tweet, oddly enough – that President Joe Biden was withdrawing from the presidential race and endorsing his Vice President Kamala Harris (in a follow-up tweet) for the impending Democratic nomination. The president’s statement is included below; it does not explain the rationale behind his choice, which leaves many unanswered questions.
My first reaction to this news was one of surprise; I personally did not believe that the quite obvious pressure campaign was going to get the president to quit the race. I am genuinely astounded that Biden left the race this way, essentially with his tail between his legs and not even giving a statement to camera. The man has been a narcissistic blowhard since he first emerged on the political stage in 1973(!) and has been running for the presidency since before I was born. The idea that he would end his career so weakly after reaching the top of the greasy pole of American politics is shocking. But it happened.
What follows are some of my other thoughts about this historic event, from what it says about Biden to its impact on the presidential race.
A full retrospective discussion of the Biden presidency and his political legacy will have to wait until after he leaves office in January, but suffice it to say that this is an ignominious end to what was a not-very-good administration. The last three-and-a-half years have seen the highest inflation since the 1980s, government spending run amok, massive amounts of illegal immigration, and a series of foreign policy debacles the likes of which we have rarely seen over the past century. The single term itself is most akin to the disastrous four years from 1977 to 1981 under Jimmy Carter – of whom a young Joe Biden was an early endorser. There is really only one potential historic analog for the way this candidacy ended, however, and that is Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ was a far more important and competent leader than Biden, but the way he dropped out of the 1968 presidential race was quite similar: seeing his popularity decline markedly, dealing with a host of foreign crises, and supporting his Vice President Hubert Humphrey for the nomination. Unlike Biden, Johnson delivered a televised address to explain his choice to the American public and left in March instead of July. It is somewhat disturbing that we still have not seen the president since this statement was released.
If Biden is dropping out of the race, how does he explain his decision to remain as president and serve out the rest of his term? His exit letter did not go into any detail as to why “it is in the best interest of [his] party and the country for [him] to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling [his] duties as President.” In that information vacuum, the obvious reason he would be dropping out would be his manifest mental decline and unfitness to serve in the future. But if his mental state is too frail for another four years of running the country, how is it currently fit for the task? This seems like a situation in which the president should either resign or be removed under the 25th Amendment, which was expressly made for this purpose. The position we find ourselves in as a nation is unprecedented. We are led by a lame duck president who is far too senile to serve as the leader of the free world and will be under his aegis for the next several months, during a series of foreign crises unlike anything since the end of the Cold War. What will our enemies do in the period from now until January? What will the White House do in response? Unfortunately, I have a strong feeling that we will learn the answers to those questions.
As I said, dropping out this late in the race has no historic precedent; LBJ left the contest months earlier, allowing the remainder of the party primaries to occur and a full nomination fight to ensue. Biden leaves the Democrats with less than a month before their nominating convention, no time at all to establish a democratic process that takes voter feelings into account. There are few options at this point in time, including for the transfer of campaign funds, shrinking the potential field of candidates, privileging the feelings of party elites, and limiting any possible pre-nomination campaigning. This selection will be made by the media and Democratic heavyweights.
As I noted, President Biden threw his support behind his Vice President, Kamala Harris, to replace him at the top of the Democratic ticket in November. The campaign infrastructure has been shifted from Biden to Harris and several key Democrat politicians have given Harris their full endorsement for the presidency. This includes some potential challengers to her coronation, such as California governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, as well as a host of congressional figures ranging from Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren to House representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jim Clyburn. But is this truly a done deal? Many commentators on both sides of the political divide think not. Part of this stems from the idea that another candidate would perform better against Trump in November, while part of it reeks of internecine party warfare. Former president Barack Obama notably did not mention Harris or give her his blessing in his statement on Biden’s decision, instead saying that he has “extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.” Given the fact that the Obama clique has been the power behind the Biden administration for the past few years and was critical to cajoling him out of the race, this seems important. But it will be a nearly-Sisyphean struggle to replace Harris at the top of the ticket; passing over the first black female Vice President who has been endorsed by a slate of key party power brokers would be a slap in the face to several important constituencies and a rejection of the party’s DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) messaging. As such, this is very unlikely to happen. But I’ve been wrong before!
Harris is a deeply flawed candidate, one who is far worse on policy than President Biden could ever dream of being. She is a radical progressive who had a Senate voting record comparable to the farthest left figures in her party, including Bernie Sanders, a literal socialist. She led the smear campaign of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, is one of the key advocates of leftist cultural and social policies, and acts as the doyenne of DEI in the Biden administration. She is also a very bad retail politician. Her 2020 presidential campaign was shambolic in the extreme, despite a fawning media that sought to boost her as much as possible. She didn’t even make it to the first contest in Iowa, blowing tens of millions of donor dollars in the process. She was eviscerated on a debate stage by Tulsi Gabbard, an also-ran gadfly. In that campaign, she endorsed the most radical ideas proffered by the left, from fully socializing the American medical system and forcibly confiscating legally-owned firearms to reparations for racism and decriminalizing illegal border crossings. She has rarely run in a competitive race in her career, and nearly lost her campaign for California Attorney General to a Republican. Yes, she nearly lost to a Republican in California. She speaks in ridiculous word salads that would sate the appetites of roomfuls of vegans, sounding like a robot when she isn’t awkwardly cackling through her own terrible jokes. She is genuinely dislikeable, having lower approval ratings than either Trump or Biden – and that’s very hard to do! Harris would be an awful president for a plethora of reasons. I’ll have more to say about her as the election nears.
A secondary story here is the truly disgraceful performance of the mainstream media in this whole debacle. The pro-Democrat press (redundant, I know) has acted in a disgusting manner over the past four years with respect to Biden. He was hidden from public view during the infamous ‘basement campaign’ in 2020, with media covering for him and brushing his major issues with age and corruption under the rug so as to defeat Donald Trump. For years now, they’ve been claiming – alongside the administration’s PR flacks – that Biden is essentially a superhero who could do pushups with one hand and run an ultramarathon blindfolded. The obvious senior moments and huge gaffes that have been broadcast live were decried as ‘cheapfakes’ or missing context. But the second that it seemed untenable to continue these blatant falsehoods, the media turned on Biden like a pack of ravenous wolves on a wounded lamb. More than anything, media pressure and Democrat leaks forced Biden out of the race. Now that he has chosen to drop out, however, the press has returned to calling him heroic, lauding him for his ‘accomplishments’, and claiming that he has singlehandedly saved Democracy once again. The cover-up of Biden’s senility will go down as one of the greatest media and political scandals in American history, if future historians have any sense at all.
This brings us to the state of the presidential race as of now. After the disastrous Biden debate performance in June and the assassination attempt last week, Trump was riding high and looking to be moving towards a victory in November. Some in his camp thought it would be an absolute landslide, with a win in both the Electoral College (the only thing that actually matters) and the popular vote. I was never that confident in Trump’s chances – about 40% of the country despises him, after all – but I did see him as the favorite over the incumbent president. Clearly, his team was more confident than I; the selection of JD Vance as his running mate was a sign of that confidence, as it doubled down on the MAGA base instead of seeking to expand it. After Biden’s withdrawal, many Republicans still see this race as a shoo-in for Trump, given the weaknesses of Harris detailed above. But this seems too confident for me. The age issue, which was the campaign’s dominant talking point (for good reason) has been eliminated entirely. Republicans gain the radicalism issue if Harris is the nominee, but they have limited time to make the charge stick. Fundraising for Harris will skyrocket, with billionaire Democrat donors opening their checkbooks in a manner not yet seen in this campaign. The media will laud Kamala even more than they did in 2020, as she is now seemingly the only thing standing between them and a second Trump presidency. Trump is himself no popular politician, even as Republicans think he has been treated unfairly by Democrats and the media. Americans remember his time in office as chaotic and overbearing, he lacks message discipline, and he was convicted of several felonies (even if you believe those charges were bogus). Depending on who Harris picks as her VP nominee – especially if it is a moderate governor of a midwestern or southern state – this race could very well be a toss-up. And if the candidate somehow isn’t Kamala, Trump may start this new race behind the eight ball. There’s still quite some time before November, and a lot can happen before then. Republicans shouldn’t count their chickens before they hatch.
Those are my first thoughts on this historic event and what it means for our politics going forward. The news cycle is moving so rapidly that this piece may be outdated by the time it is published. The speed at which events are occurring and changes are being made is ludicrous, verging on plaid, and things will continue to evolve quickly. If it feels like this past week has been a whirlwind of news, it has; the assassination attempt on Trump was less than a fortnight ago! We seem to be speedrunning a historic political campaign season; as a historian, I find this simultaneously bizarre, horrifying, and fascinating. But you sure as hell can’t claim that we’re not living in interesting times.