The president is in the wind.
In the 24 hours that have elapsed since Joe Biden announced that he would not seek renomination to the presidency, we’ve seen little in the way of proof that the president is executing the duties of his office save a doctor’s note that claims Biden “continues to perform all of his presidential duties.”
In the interim, however, we learned that Biden would not be taking a meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as scheduled. If the president has a contingency in place when the Israeli leader touches down in Washington, D.C., tomorrow, the prime minister’s office noted only that “we are still waiting for an answer from the White House.” This is not the sort of behavior you would expect to see from an administration that has any life left in it.
We have no reason to believe that the president is somehow incapacitated, but we don’t have proof otherwise. What we do have, however, is ample evidence that Biden is a spent force. Had he stuck to his guns and refused to step back from the nominating process, it would be easier to envision Biden’s continued tenure in the Oval Office until Inauguration Day. But with the news that Biden will step back from politics at the end of his first term, the president became a much-diminished figure. He seems to know it.
Today, Biden is only a political liability for Democrats. His nominal occupancy of the presidency denies Democrats the opportunity to retail the notion that Trump is “too old” for the presidency, as some of the Democratic Party’s craven opportunists insisted shortly after Biden withdrew from the race. The president’s allies cannot square the logic of their contention that Biden is too old to govern next January but A-OK for the next five months — his continued tenure in the Oval Office makes his allies look like fools. And because the president cannot simply disappear from the public eye, Biden is all but bound to say and do things that are so agonizingly off-message that they throw his fellow Democrats off their games.
Sooner than they think, Democrats will come to resent Biden’s refusal to abdicate the office he occupies. For that reason, the party will probably have to reprise its display of collective action to push the president out of office once and for all. The opportunity will present itself after the Democrats’ nominating convention, in which Biden will be given a lavish sendoff, deliver a tightly scripted farewell address, and hand proceedings off to Harris, who will debut her vice-presidential pick. After continuity has been established, Biden’s allies will insist, the president’s best course of action will be to surrender the reins to his deputy so she can run for the White House as an incumbent.
The GOP in Congress can raise a stink about all this and drag their feet in confirming an interim administration, but Democrats would likely welcome the chance to rail theatrically against recalcitrant House Republicans who would deny the country a fully functional executive branch. Whatever resistance there is to the terms of Biden’s resignation would probably be short-lived.
