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Joe Biden Is Now Democracy's Greatest Liability
Now is the time for those who care about the survival of even minimally democratic governance to speak up, to pressure Biden, his advisers, and Democratic Party elites, to chart a new course.
Jun 28, 2024
Joe Biden’s performance last night in CNN’s so-called “debate” with Donald Trump was a monumental disaster, for his campaign and for everyone who cares about democracy in the U.S.
Ever since first entering the presidential race in 2019, Biden has claimed to personify the strongest political bulwark against Charlottesville-style neofascism and Trumpist authoritarianism. The claim was redeemed in the 2019-2020 Democratic primary and in the November 2020 election, and it retained some plausibility in the early months of Biden’s administration. But it has become increasingly hollow as his agenda has been stalled (in large part due to GOP obstruction but also his refusal to upend the Senate filibuster rule), his political energy has flagged, and his popularity has tanked. His senescent, confused, and beleaguered performance last night, and his complete lack of any unifying theme much less a galvanizing vision, was the last straw for a great many who have long feared for the outcome of this coming November election.
Back on July 21, 2022, I argued that “Biden Should Not Run For President in 2024”:
I do not think that Biden is a ‘bad’ President. I never thought he would bring forward a new New Deal. He has faced serious challenges and obstacles and has lacked the mandate and the Congressional votes to do great things.
But he has been listless; his ‘bipartisanship’ shtick has been a huge failure; and he has done whatever he can do already. He is a very flawed figure, a very mediocre and uninspiring ‘leader,’ and an old man who has obviously slowed and whose ideas about ‘institutional memory’ are antiquated. He does not have the energy, the charisma, or frankly the record to run again as the standard bearer of a Democratic party serious about defending and extending democracy.
He did turn out to be the person who stood between us and Trump in 2020. His time in office thus far has been very shaky. Most of that is hardly his fault. But he is now a vulnerable incumbent who can no longer represent what he represented in 2020—banality in the face of Trump’s destructive megalomania.
The best thing Joe Biden can do for his reputation and historical stature is to spend the next two years doing what he can within his executive power to defend liberal democratic institutions and then to bow out gracefully and allow a real primary contest to mobilize activists and voters and generate some enthusiasm. The only thing that might save the republic moving forward is enthusiasm among Democratic leaders and within the Democratic base. And the best hope to generate this enthusiasm is a real competition for leadership of the party. It remains to be seen whether such a reenergization of the Democratic party is possible. But if it is not, our already dark times are likely to quickly become much darker.
I was hardly alone. David Axelrod, Ezra Klein, Harold Meyerson, and many others made similar arguments. They mainly fell on deaf ears, primarily for one reason: once Biden made it clear that he had decided to run for re-election, a primary fight against an incumbent seemed like a fool’s errand, and most people who knew better were afraid to say that “the emperor had no clothes” because doing so would seem to only weaken “Democratic unity” while strengthening Trump.
Simply going forward as if the Biden campaign has not suffered a death blow is not an option.
The electoral calculations had some merit. But the stakes have never been simply electoral. For, as Biden and every other Democrat and Democrat-leaning pundit has insisted for years, “democracy itself is on the ballot.” Back in February of this year, I published “Has Biden Gone From Democracy’s Best Bulwark to Its Greatest Liability?” arguing, in the affirmative, that “It is not simply that Biden increasingly appears to be a weak candidate given the demands of the contest. It is also that every week that passes makes clearer that the stakes are so high, and the risks too great, to ‘bet’ on Biden as if this were a normal election. And the stakes are nothing less than the question on which Biden himself has staked his entire presidency since 2015: the survival of America’s tattered democracy itself.”
After last night, it is no longer possible to pretend that Biden is a strong or even a capable candidate, or that he can credibly lead the nation through a very real political-economic crisis of democracy for four more years—and “leadership” means more than occupying the Oval Office.
The hastily emergent consensus among a wide range of liberal and left commentators about the implications of Biden’s failure is striking.
In today’s New York Times: Thomas Friedman, “Joe Biden is a Good Man and a Good President. He Must Bow Out of the Race”; Paul Krugman, “The Best President of My Life Needs to Withdraw”; and Nicholas Kristof, “President Biden, I’ve Seen Enough.”
In today’s Washington Post: Ramesh Ponnuru, ”Trump is too dangerous for Democrats to stick with Biden,” and Karen Tumulty, “The Great Democratic Freakout is upon us.”
In today’s The Atlantic: David A. Graham, “A Disaster for Joe Biden”; Franklin Foer, “Someone Needs to Take Biden’s Keys”; Mark Leibovich, “Time to Go, Joe;” and Jerusalem Demsas, “Dropping Out is Biden’s Most Patriotic Option.”
In today’s The Bulwark: William Kristol and Andrew Egger, “It’s Not Too Late. Biden Should Step Aside” and Tim Miller, “The Bidens Need to Have a Talk.”
In the Nation: Jeet Heer, “Trump Was Terrible. Biden Was Worse”: “Trump’s lies and unhinged ranting went unchallenged because Biden was incoherent and lost.”
In the New Republic: Alex Shepard: “Ditch Biden. That Debate Performance Was a Disaster.”
In the New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser, “Was the Debate the Beginning of the End of Joe Biden’s Presidency? Notes on a Disastrous Night for the Democrats.”
And in the American Prospect: Robert Kuttner, “A Tarnished Silver Lining: Biden was so inept that the case for replacing him is now overwhelming” and Harold Meyerson, “The Democrats Must Dump Trump. Here’s How.”
Meyerson makes an especially strong case for the why and the how. As many commentators have already responded, such a move would be unprecedented, and carries real risks of Democratic disunity.
But everything about the current situation is unprecedented, especially if we believe, as so many of us have long been saying, that the MAGA Republican party poses a clear and present danger to even the most minimal understanding of democracy, and a second Trump administration would be an utter nightmare.
There are risks of moving from Biden. But are these risks greater than the risks of staying with Biden?
His support is now hemorrhaging. Further, the reason why is not simply because he had a bad debate performance, but because the performance confirmed all the worst fears about his candidacy, and his leadership, that are shared by even most of his supporters. Biden has always been an uninspired and an uninspiring politician. But as long as he could claim to represent the best chance to beat Trump with even the barest of credibility, many of us were willing to go along. But the credibility of this claim was shattered last night.
What Meyerson proposes is not a simple “dumping.” Like many of the others cited above, he proposes that major Democratic party leaders—Shumer, Jeffries, Pelosi, Obama, the Clintons—work, along with his circle of advisers, to persuade Biden to gracefully bow out and firmly offer his blessing to a candidate better able to carry the torch. Such a move would involve gaming some real Democratic party rules; garnering real support among key Democratic stakeholders; and forging some kind of agreement among likely alternative candidates—Governors Whitmer, Beshear, Simon, and Newsom, and of course Vice President Harris—about a process of candidate selection.
Yes, this is complicated, and might not be feasible, especially if Biden refuses, as he almost surely will.
But simply going forward as if the Biden campaign has not suffered a death blow is not an option.
And failing to consider an alternative to the Biden candidacy comes with enormous electoral risks, for the presidential election and all down-ballot races. This is something that all serious Democratic leaders must realize. Can any rational person imagine that Biden has any chance of mobilizing young voters, or Black or Hispanic voters, or RFK-leaning voters, or swing voters? Indeed, he so badly botched the abortion questions last night that it is not even clear that he can mobilize women in the numbers previously imagined.
And Biden’s senescent debilities aside, how can he possibly succeed when he has already lost the confidence of much of the Democrat-leaning media that is having an increasingly difficult time refraining from either weeping or vomiting as they discuss his candidacy?
As David Frum observes in today’s Atlantic, “Trump Should Never Have Had This Platform.” His argument is neatly summed up in its tag line “The debate was a travesty—because its whole premise was to treat a failed coup leader as a legitimate candidate for the presidency.” And of course he is right. But it was Biden—Mr. “I am the savior of democracy”—who proposed the debate, who agreed to treat the failed coup leader as a legitimate candidate for the presidency, and who botched every opportunity during the debate effectively to make democracy the issue he claims to champion (his repeated Cold War platitudes about defending Ukraine and Poland notwithstanding). And these egregious failings are simply reflections of the larger problem: Biden is simply not a strong defender of democracy, and his rhetorical appeals to democracy are increasingly hollow, inconsistent, and lacking in credibility.
Nothing about his campaign or its messaging is compelling or credible except for the fact that he is not Trump. In 2020 this was enough. But in 2024 it is not enough.
It is too early to know what will happen next. The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein has framed “The Great Democratic Conundrum” clearly: “how to replace the presidential candidate without tearing the party apart and losing the election anyway?” Brownstein, like Meyerson, lays out the alternatives, drawing heavily from interviews with Democratic insiders such as James Carville (“What is there to fucking say?” Carville told me. “How could somebody not see this coming? I’m just flummoxed.”) What Brownstein, Meyerson, and all the others are saying is surely right: “the prospect of the party simply marching forward with Biden as if nothing happened last night seems difficult to imagine.” I would go further: such a prospect would be nothing short of insane.
The situation now is more precarious than at any time since 2016, for Trump is a rabid beast, and he now smells blood, and if he wins in November, his “retribution” will be devastating.
Now is the time for those who care about the survival of even minimally democratic governance to speak up, to pressure Biden, his advisers, and Democratic Party elites, to chart a new course. To believe that Biden can lead the way forward is delusional.
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The Big Apple Debate
Last night's CNN Democratic presidential debate in Brooklyn was both contentious and clarifying. It was contentious because the each candidate has had it with the other. Clinton is aggravated that Sanders has been surging and irritated that he keeps pointing out that she's the big money, establishment candidate in the race.
Apr 15, 2016
Last night's CNN Democratic presidential debate in Brooklyn was both contentious and clarifying. It was contentious because the each candidate has had it with the other. Clinton is aggravated that Sanders has been surging and irritated that he keeps pointing out that she's the big money, establishment candidate in the race. Sanders is tired of Clinton distorting his record, and being slippery about her own positions. But, contrary to the hand wringing of pundits, it isn't the personal distemper that will make unity difficult in the fall. It is significant differences on policy, direction and strategy.
The Obama Card
Once more, Clinton made herself the candidate of continuity. She wrapped herself in President Obama again and again. She invoked him to defend taking big bucks from Wall Street and special interests. She cited his appointment of her to defend her foreign policy judgment. She used his energy plan to dodge questions about her promotion of fracking and refusal to embrace a carbon tax. She put the decision to go into Libya on his shoulders to deflect her responsibility for that calamity.
President Obama is popular among Democrats. And in New York, only registered Democrats can vote in the primary. (Independents, those registered with the Working Family Party, etc. won't be able to vote). Clinton wants to firm up her lead among African-American voters. So tactically, the Obama card makes sense.
Strategically, however, it makes her the candidate for Obama's third term - at a time when the country is looking for change. She'll no doubt try to reset that image if she wins the nomination, but the imprint may be indelible.
The Strategic Divide
The debate repeatedly revealed the core divide between Clinton and Sanders: their theory of change and what's possible. Sanders argues that the country needs fundamental change. Our economy is rigged; our politics is corrupted. So he lays out big, common sense, but fundamental reforms: national health care, a new trade regime, tuition free public college, a mobilization to meet the challenge of climate change, etc. The only way to get these, he argues, is run independent of the big money of the entrenched interests that have rigged the rules, and to mobilize a political uprising that provides a mandate, and forces the obstructionists and the timid to get out of the way.
Clinton, and most of the chattering classes, dismiss this as romantic, at best. She constantly defends her embrace of less bold reform as necessary because she wants to "get things done." She supports building on Obama's health care plan because it's practical. She supports a $12.00 an hour minimum wage because she wants to "get things done." She offers complicated, preemptively compromised reforms because they are more realistic.
But in today's Washington, the once pragmatic is utterly unrealistic. Clinton's program isn't much different from Obama's. But the Republican Congress obstructs any progress on Obama's agenda. They don't favor a $12.00 minimum wage over a $15.00 one, they won't allow a vote on raising the wage at all. Clinton suggests that she'll be more effective because she's prepared to schmooze with politicians, drink them under the table, meeting with them constantly and do whatever is needed to get things done. She'll have support of big interests that have financed her campaign. This is essentially a plea to go back to politics as we once knew it.
There are two problems with that. Even if we could go back to the old politics, it won't get us where we need to go. Without fundamental change - change of the very things the old order put in place and defends with a vengeance - most Americans will continue to struggle. And, the Right that now controls the Republican Congress isn't playing by the old rules. Clinton is as loathed by the Right as Obama is. And there is no reason to think that she'll have the kind of sweeping victory needed to sober the Republican obstructionists. Sanders argument may be far-fetched, but it is more realistic than Clinton's business as usual notion. (And of course the things that the Clinton might find agreement on -- corporate trade deals, austerity, cutting Medicare and Social Security as part of a "grand bargain," tax giveaways to corporations - would only make things worse.)
Driving the Debate
Populism - and populist movements - drive this debate, largely because of the Sanders candidacy. Clinton now believes she must embrace breaking up the big banks, defeating the TPP trade deal she once described as the "gold standard," a $15 minimum wage, lifting the Social Security cap and more. She carefully hedges her statements, making her commitments hazy much to Sanders' irritation. But she's moved to meet the temper of the time.
The Foreign Policy Vacuum
Foreign policy got a bit more attention in this debate. Sanders continued his attack on Clinton's judgment because of the vote on Iraq, but expanded that to her responsibility for Libya. He took a relatively courageous position on Israel that Clinton chose not to join. He stood by his call for demanding the allies pay their fair share for NATO, which Clinton echoed.
But once more, Clinton's record of supporting failed interventions didn't come out. It isn't just Iraq. She championed the coup in Honduras, the intervention in Libya, going after Assad in Syria, the surge in Afghanistan, the meddling in Ukraine. At the debate last night, she put forth a chilling argument about a "more aggressive" Russia, suggesting that it wanted to "rewrite the map of Europe."
Sanders has relentlessly focused on his core message and agenda. He hasn't wanted to let debates on foreign policy or other issues distract from it. And he's looked less comfortable on those issues than on domestic policy. But presidents now have a virtually free hand on foreign policy. And while Clinton clearly will be "prepared from day one," the alarming question of prepared for what must be probed.
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Defending Attack on Libya, Clinton Blames Obama--And Suggests Repeat for Syria
Former secretary of state mounts questionable defense of disastrous intervention in Libya during Democratic debate
Apr 15, 2016
During a heated Democratic debate in New York on Thursday night, Hillary Clinton sought to both defend and deflect responsibility for her central role in destabilizing Libya--by blaming President Barack Obama.
"The decision was the president's," she said in response to criticism from rival Bernie Sanders over her leadership as then-Secretary of State during the 2011 military intervention to overthrow Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
"Did I do due diligence? Did I talk to everybody I could talk to? Did I visit every capitol and then report back to the president? Yes, I did. That's what every secretary of state does," Clinton said. "But at the end of the day, those are the decisions that are made by the president to in any way use American military power, and the president made that decision, and yes, we did try without success because of the Libyans' obstruction to our efforts, but we did try and will continue to try to help the Libyan people."
The remarks come just days after Obama admitted in an interview with Fox News that "failing to plan for the day after" Gaddafi's toppling was the "worst mistake" of his presidency.
In a previous debate, Clinton said the president had made "the right decision at the time" and blamed the instability that followed on the Arab Spring and "a lot of other things."
The contrast in perspectives was quickly noted by observers, who also pointed out that Clinton's seeming blame of the president comes after she criticized Sanders for his disapproval of Obama's policies.
Hillary Clinton used Obama's name 45x in last nites #DemDebate except when she refused 2 accept her failed policy in Libya as he has
-- GAPeach (@PoliticsPeach) April 15, 2016
\u201cUnless she genuinely feels none, shouldn't @HillaryClinton express some regrets or lessons learned on Libya? #demdebate\u201d— David Axelrod (@David Axelrod) 1460686339
\u201cPresident Obama got thrown under the bus on #Libya by Secretary Clinton. #DemDebate\u201d— Linda Sarsour (@Linda Sarsour) 1460686701
Sanders also questioned whether Clinton's judgment in Libya would follow in Syria.
He criticized Clinton for "getting actively involved to overthrow and bring about regime change without fully understanding what the consequence of that regime change would be.... I know you keep referring to Barack Obama all night here, but you in Syria, you in Syria talked about a no-fly zone, which the president certainly does not support, nor do I support because, a) it will cost an enormous sum of money, [and] second of all, it risks getting us sucked into perpetual warfare in that region."
Clinton responded with both another seeming criticism of Obama--and by suggesting regime change in Syria.
"Yes, when I was secretary of state, I did urge along with the Department of Defense and the CIA that we seek out, vet, and train, and arm Syrian opposition figures so that they could defend themselves against [President Bashar al] Assad. The president said no."
"I think it's only fair to look at where we are in Syria today and yes, I do still support a no-fly zone because I think we need to put in safe havens for those poor Syrians who are fleeing both Assad and ISIS and so they have some place they can be safe," she said. "Nobody stood up to Assad and removed him, and we have a far greater disaster in Syria than we are currently dealing with right now in Libya."
That comment was noticed as well.
\u201cIn defense of going to war in Libya (a war w/no day after plan, as Obama conceded), Hillary says should have gone to war in Syria #demdebate\u201d— Lee Fang (@Lee Fang) 1460686500
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