Honor demands Joe Biden step aside

Democrats need an effective nominee, this isn't it

I’ve long thought that concerns about Joe Biden’s age were overstated as a source of his political problems.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

He didn’t really poll worse than other Democrats in head-to-head matchups against Trump, his vice president and most likely replacement was less popular than him, and his struggles seemed to me to be roughly in line with the political struggles of essentially every developed country incumbent. Indeed, I’ve long been struck by the fact that despite various economic troubles, the American economy is the strongest in the world and Biden is more popular than his peer leaders in other major countries.

What I did give some credence to was that Biden’s age was hurting his ability to perform the role of presidential candidate.

The most boring version of this is that he has a stiff old man gait, so he walks in a kind of shuffling manner. Hip flexibility and leg mobility are not important parts of doing the job of president, though. FDR, one of America’s best presidents, couldn’t walk at all. But politically speaking, people seem to care a lot about the president being able to walk confidently. FDR and his team, after all, hid his paralysis from the country.

Biden was doing less media than you’d expect from a president, and that was hurting his ability to get his message out. There were a number of possible interpretations of that, and my preferred interpretation was that it reflected an excessive level of gaffe-aversion among his communications staff — a team that frankly did not always seem aligned with the president ideologically. I thought they were worried that Biden would go off-script and say something accidentally moderate, like when he told the crowd at a fundraiser that he’s not a fan of abortion on demand. But I thought these fears were misguided and that a “let Biden be Biden” approach would be better.

The campaign, though, did not take my advice and sold the world on the debate as Biden’s big chance to do what he did at the State of the Union and show us just how good he can be as a speaker.

But while the State of Union did Biden a lot of good, it wasn’t an all-time great speech or anything. He delivered replacement level oratory, and simply accomplishing that improved the vibes and helped his chances. It was a clear sign that he was up to the job, but also that the bar for “this person would be a better nominee” was ultimate not that high. Now, after a debate performance that I and everyone else felt was below replacement level, I think it’s worth reminding ourselves that he didn’t even need to deliver a great performance to help himself.

There are naturally a lot of I-told-you-sos today from the people who’ve been slagging Biden on age grounds for a long time. I think it was correct to withhold judgment until we saw the debate. First and foremost because in the real world, if the nominee is not the president, it is overwhelmingly likely to be the vice president. It’s fun and interesting to speculate about various mechanisms to select someone else and it certainly could happen, but I think a political scheme that counts on Gretchen Whitmer walking through the door is a very unsound gamble. You shouldn’t try to shove the president out of the way unless you’re prepared to say the vice president would be better.

After watching the debate, I think it’s clear that Harris would be better.

Will she rise to the occasion and become a great politician? I hope so. But I wouldn’t count on it. Would she deliver replacement-level performance? I’m quite sure she would. She wouldn’t say “we finally beat Medicare” when she meant “we finally beat the prescription drug companies and let Medicare bargain for lower prices.” She wouldn’t let her opponent repeatedly — and falsely — claim that immigrants are undermining Social Security’s finances when the exact opposite is true. She wouldn’t discuss crime while forgetting to mention that the murder rate is lower now than it was when Trump left office.

I have a lot of ideas about how Harris could be a better politician and a lot of opinions about which politicians would be better than Harris. But she’s a replacement-level Democrat, and at this point, Biden is clearly below that. I don’t think “he has trouble controlling his stutter” actually warrants the strong inferences that his enemies are drawing about his mental acuity or his ability to make decisions. But “speaking under pressure without stuttering” is a bona fide occupational qualification for the job of major party presidential candidate. You don’t need to make this into more than it is for it to be a crippling problem. It’s hard to win a presidential campaign if you can’t go on television and deliver your message effectively, and it’s hard to deliver your message effectively when you look and sound like Biden does right now.

In her prescient and correct 2020 primary season article “The Case for Joe Biden,” Laura McGann made the point that in the 2018 cycle Biden was the most in-demand campaign surrogate for frontline Democrats. He was also, not coincidentally, the guy with the most endorsements from frontline members in the 2020 cycle. But if Biden were not currently president, he’s not someone candidates would want to use as a campaign surrogate. He’s not a good spokesperson. And the Democratic Party needs an effective spokesperson to make the case against Trump.

By the polling, I think the best options are Whitmer or Pete Buttigieg, but you could make the case for someone more obscure like Josh Shapiro or someone even more moderate like Andy Beshear.

But the point is, Harris would be fine, if that’s how it shakes out. Biden should say that with the future of the country on the line, he owes it to America to let the Democratic Party put forward a nominee who is full-time on the job of making the case against Trump, while he stays full-time on the job of dealing with the wars in Ukraine and Israel. He should pardon his son, who is being perversely treated much more harshly than a typical criminal defendant to make a point. And he should retire next year with a proud legacy and spend time with his family.

I think these notions of a committee of Democratic Party elders making this point to the president are a little bit fantastical. People want the party system to work in a way that it doesn’t work. But his family members probably have some influence on his thinking. And I think a tougher issue is that frontline members — the members whose careers he saved by being the nominee in 2020 — are going to have to spend all summer and fall answering questions about his fitness. They will probably end up needing to throw him under the bus, and if they’re smart, they’ll probably do it sooner rather than later.

Biden has a lot to be proud of in his presidency. He also has a right to feel a personal sense of both pride and resentment about having been kind of cast aside in 2016 in favor of Hillary Clinton, and having been passed over by most of the top operatives and donors in 2020. He would have been a much better choice in 2016, and in retrospect, he was the right choice in 2020. If I were Joe Biden, I would not want to listen to pundits saying, “Okay, but this time we really should go in a different direction than Biden.” And I especially would not want to listen to it from people who are deeply ideologically hostile to my style of politics.

That’s why I’m saying it, because I am not hostile to Biden’s style of politics, and I spent a long time dreading the prospect that he would stand down and re-open a 2020-style policy bidding war. But the fact is, running for president is a very difficult job, especially when you also doing the job of being the president. Biden is, at this point, not a good choice for the job.