After weeks of pressure from Democratic party insiders, Joe Biden has finally said he won’t seek re-election. ‘I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term,’ he said in a one-page letter, offering his ‘full support and endorsement for Kamala [Harris] to be the nominee of our party this year’. So Biden and the Democratic establishment want quick coronation of the Vice President, not any serious contest at the Democrat convention in Chicago. ‘Democrats – it’s time to come together and beat Trump,’ Biden wrote at the end of his letter. ‘Let’s do this.’
Bill Clinton has endorsed Harris. Barack Obama has called for ‘an outstanding nominee to emerge’ and it’s said that Nancy Pelosi wants a mini-primary – but they’re also both understood to back Harris. Any contest, therefore, would likely be a tame one, designed to strengthen her position. Only one sitting vice president has been elected president since 1836. But that does not deter Harris, who has declared her intention to seek the nomination and – like Biden, emphasising the need for unity amongst Democrats. Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker, is pushing for Harris to take charge now. ‘If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President. He must resign the office immediately..’
It has been 56 years since Americans saw their presidential candidates change at such a late stage. But theThe only surprise, in the end, was that Biden’s decision took so long. Biden has become a shell of the man he once was. Voters knew it, and polls showed that they were not going to re-elect him. They also knew they had been lied to by the White House and by Biden’s political allies. The cumulative result was almost certain to cost Democrats not only the White House, but the House and Senate as well. Biden’s exit evoked the fate of that great cartoon character, Wile E. Coyote. His futile pursuit of the Road Runner usually ended with Wile E. running off a cliff but remaining suspended in mid-air until he looked down. When he finally looked, he began plummeting to the canyon floor, far below.
Only one sitting vice president has been elected president since 1836
That is Joe Biden’s fate, ran off the cliff after his catastrophic debate performance against Donald Trump. For weeks, Biden refused to look down. He wouldn’t look when his wife helped him walk down a few stairs after the debate. He wouldn’t look when Barack Obama had to guide him off the stage at George Clooney’s star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles. He wouldn’t look when major donors reported their shock at his frail appearance and began closing their cheque books. He wouldn’t look as he stumbled through recent interviews. He wouldn’t look as more elected officials began calling for him to end the race for reelection. The canyon was too far below. Better to try and stay suspended in mid-air.
He had a little help, at least for a while. The major media was slow to abandon the candidate they had backed for so long. The day after the Clooney fundraiser, the Washington Post ran a rainbows-and-unicorns article about fine it all was. Nothing to see here; please move along. A month later, the same paper reported on the same event, saying, in effect, their earlier article didn’t give the full picture and that Biden was in bad shape. Of course, they never admitted their own shameful role in misleading their readers.
After the debate fiasco, the only way for Biden to get back on solid ground was to give extemporaneous interviews and avoid major mistakes. If he were successfully, he would prove he could still do the job.
Unfortunately, those interviews did not go well. He waited too long after the debate to begin them and then did too little to assuage voters’ concerns. He made grotesque errors (for instance, saying he was the first black vice president), and his team was caught handing softball questions to some radio stations. The best one could say about these interviews was ‘some weren’t so bad’.
Biden gave himself much higher grades and kept saying (to paraphrase), ‘I’m staying in this race, and I’m not changing my mind. My health is fine, the polls show a close race, and I’ve always been “the comeback kid”.’
Biden may have truly believed that, but party bigwigs did not. Not any longer. Their sober reassessment posed a terrible dilemma for them and their party because Biden alone controlled the decision whether to stay or go. He had won all the Democratic primaries because he was the incumbent and insiders had been too timid to endorse a serious challenger when it really mattered. The result was that Biden had more than enough convention delegates to win the nomination. He controlled the decision whether to stay in the race.
He clearly wanted to stay and said it time and time again, publicly and privately. Since Biden held all the cards, what pushed him out? A succession of grim, private conversations with the party’s leaders from the House and Senate and major Democratic fundraisers. Their voices carried weight because they had all supported him. Until now.
No more. They had read the polling results with a cold eye and listened to their beleaguered members, who feared Biden’s name at the top of the ticket would cost them their jobs. All of them concluded the presidential race was hopeless, even before Donald Trump emerged triumphant from an assassination attempt. The insiders’ verdict, echoed by their major donors and the media, was that Biden would cost Democrats the House and Senate. Staying in, they told him privately, would seal his historic image as the architect of disaster.
This message from elected leaders was reinforced by his most loyal fundraisers, who told him the money had dried up. Some was going to down-ballot races to avert disaster there. Some had dried up for those candidate, too. Every Democratic running in a purple district was petrified, and they were saying so to party leaders. It was those vulnerable who led the public calls for Biden to withdraw.
Yet these public calls were not Biden’s biggest problem. The numbers were growing, but they were still relatively small. The problem was the private calls. Those were harsh, and they could easily go public if Biden refused to budge. Their message was loud and clear: ‘Get out. Now.’
The same message was echoed in critical reports from the legacy media, long an integral part of the Democratic coalition. They had covered up for him for years. For the last two, at least, they had failed to meet their fundamental duty to tell the public about Biden’s cognitive and physical decline. Why did they fail? Because their partisan commitment to Democratic victory overrode their journalistic responsibility to tell the truth.
The final blows came in a public-private combo attack by Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi
They couldn’t continue the cover-up after the debate. The voting public could finally see Biden’s decline for themselves. They could also see that the mainstream media had not been telling them the truth.
Now that the mainstream media had been caught out, they turned from lap dogs to attack dogs. They weren’t just trying to salvage their reputations. They were also trying to get Biden out of the race, just as other Democratic party insiders were.
Put another way, the media is part of the party machine. That was true when they were covering for Biden, and it was equally true after they turned on him. Their positions track those of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, both before and after the debate. They shouldn’t get credit for following like lemmings.
Once the media turned, the White House briefing room became a war zone. Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, deserved combat pay for conducting those briefings. The once-suppliant media no longer bought her basic message, ‘all is well’. How could they after the public had seen what Biden’s condition really was? KJP’s denials began to sound like those of Baghdad Bob.
The final blows came in a public-private combo attack by Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi. Schiff, who is running for Senate in deep blue California, privately told donors Biden should get out. He knew that message would leak, and it did. Schiff then followed up by saying the same thing publicly. Informed observers knew he would never do that without backing from the most important Democrat in California, former speaker Nancy Pelosi. That connection and Schiff’s public statement sent a powerful message to Biden. So did reports that Pelosi had been working the phones trying to remove the president.
Pelosi followed up by saying the same thing privately to Biden. Her message: there’s no way you can win, and you will cost us the House and Senate. You will damage your own legacy.
The clearest signal that these calls were having an impact came when the Democratic party refused to hold an early, virtual meeting to hand Biden the nomination before the Chicago convention.
That refusal was stunning. A sitting president should be able to control his convention. When he could not, the message was blunt. ‘You don’t control the party any longer. True, you can decide to stay in the race, but you won’t have the party behind you. You won’t get any more money. No embattled candidates will stand beside you in public. You’re on your own.’ Biden could see that for himself when he held a (small) rally in Michigan, a crucial battleground state. He stood there alone. All the state’s top elected officials were too busy having their hair washed. None was willing to stand in the same crowd with Biden. Another message sent.
Kamala Harris, is unpopular and perceived as incompetent, but it is nearly impossible to by-pass her
That Biden received this grim news was clear when he finally opened the door publicly to leaving the race. He made that concession when he said he would leave the race if his doctor told him ‘I had some medical condition that emerged.’ That’s not a high bar to clear. He already has those medical conditions.
With that concession, Joe Biden walked slowly, gingerly, stiffly off the same cliff as Wile E. Coyote. Worse, his erstwhile political allies kept yelling: ‘Please look down. Look down. Look down.’
When he finally did, he began plummeting toward the inevitable splat. His fall proves the deep truth of Enoch Powell’s observation that: ‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’
That is how Joe Biden’s political life ends. In failure.
The scope of that failure is not confined to Biden. It envelopes his party for three reasons: they made the switch so late; Harris, is unpopular and perceived as incompetent, but it is nearly impossible to bypass her without destroying the Democratic coalition; and the party’s problems were never limited to Biden’s poor health. His policies were unpopular and unsuccessful, and those are true-blue Democratic policies.
These failing policies branded Joe and Kamala with a Scarlet A (for ‘Abysmal Failure’). But others were branded, too. Their policies are those of today’s Democratic party, and they will take the fall for them. The whole party backed an open border. They loved the huge spending programs that flooded the country with federal money after the covid crisis had passed, fuelling inflation.
Those failed policies are the anvil attached to all Democratic candidates as they follow Joe Biden and Wile E. Coyote off the cliff. They have looked down and know a huge splat is coming.
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