Joe Biden did the right thing in ending the charade of asking the American public to believe that he was capable of serving another four years as president. Now, Biden has issued a statement dropping out of the race and has endorsed his vice president Kamala Harris.
Biden should take the next logical step and resign the presidency. It’s possible to imagine a president not being able to campaign but still being capable of carrying out his official duties — say, if he had a serious physical impairment. And it is even possible to imagine a president who could serve for another six months but not another four and a half years. But such scenarios do not apply to Biden.
Biden has obviously been confused in public, and we are getting disturbing reports of his not recognizing friends and Democratic lawmakers in private. He has not convened a full cabinet meeting since last October, and CNN reported that when he does, “it is customary for Cabinet officials to submit questions and key talking points that they plan to present in front of Biden ahead of time to White House aides.” Similarly, the White House has pre-screened questions before press interviews. Whatever the level of his decline at the moment, it is sure to get worse. The country deserves to have complete assurance that the president of the United States, whatever his party or ideology, is fully in possession of his faculties.
For the Democrats’ political purposes, a resignation would also likely create more of a honeymoon for Kamala Harris and perhaps make it easier for her to hit reset in the campaign.
In isolation, Democrats would be better served to look beyond Harris, ideally to a governor with a more moderate image. But Biden’s endorsement, the compressed timetable, and the difficulty of passing over an African-American woman will presumably make that very difficult, if not impossible.
Democrats wouldn’t be in this fix if Biden and his family had taken full accounting of his aging when they decided to run again last year and if the White House, Democratic leaders, the press, and various other insiders hadn’t undertaken an effort to cover up Biden’s state. They all knew what was going on but figured that if they didn’t talk about it, somehow people wouldn’t notice. Of course, they did.
That cover-up was intended to deceive the American people, but its first victims were Democratic primary voters, who were denied a real choice or a real say in their party’s nominee. The serious potential candidates were sidelined by pressure to close ranks publicly behind Biden, who refused to debate the few, marginal primary opponents he attracted. The party owes an apology to Congressman Dean Phillips, who ran a quixotic campaign to sound the alarm.
The conspiracy of silence, as New York magazine has called it, unraveled after Biden’s catastrophic performance in the debate. Then, many Democrats and the media turned against him not because they were conscience-stricken about previously lying about his condition but because they got caught and feared losing. This shameful performance that literally put the country at risk should never be forgotten.
It’s unclear how a Kamala Harris nomination would affect the race. She would instantly take the age issue off the table and may be able to regain some ground among traditional Democratic constituencies. On the other hand, as a woke, relatively young progressive from California, she probably wouldn’t do as well as Biden did among older white voters. Harris would be vulnerable to the charge of radicalism in a way Biden wasn’t as a doddering old man, and certainly nothing prior to this extraordinary turn of events has suggested that she’s an exceptional political talent. As Biden’s vice president, she also carries both the policy baggage of his administration and her own implication in the cover-up.
That said, Trump is still unpopular with many people, and the economy has been improving. Harris will get a burst of fundraising and positive media attention. Republicans in Milwaukee last week were almost giddy about Trump’s chances in November. Maybe Harris, or some other replacement, will fail to launch, but it’s safer to assume that this will be a real race.
At least the centerpiece of the Democratic campaign will no longer be a flagrant falsehood that nearly everyone recognizes as such. Biden is no longer offering himself up as the next president of the United States until January 2029 and, if he really wants to put the country first as he said in his statement, should resign the presidency right now.
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