And just like that, the 2024 U.S. Presidential Campaign has its next stunner. Calls were beginning to mount from inside and outside the direct world of politics for current U.S. President Joe Biden to drop out of the race, and it turns out he is going to oblige, while also endorsing current Vice President, Kamala Harris, as the candidate-of-choice to take his place. While I am glad Biden has come to this decision, Democrats continue to have their work cut out for them to first of all rally around a candidate then to make a solid case to the American people.
Biden’s case was growing increasingly dubious due to his current age of 81 and with his cognitive decline on display at the first debate with former President Trump, whose own campaign was almost surely strengthened after being wounded by a recent shooting at one of his rallies in Butler, Pennsylvania. I agree with Mark Zuckerberg, by the way, that there was something poignant about Trump’s fist in the air with blood running down his face. Is Trump the kind of opportunist who will mobilize something like this? You bet. It was a powerful image, and both politics and marketing turn on powerful images.
The egotistic nature of our politics isn’t limited to Trump, by the way, and that is precisely why part of me was so surprised by Biden’s decision to exit the race. We’re frankly not very good at admitting problems we’re a part of, often until it’s way too late, and the people around Biden must have been able to persuade him not to wait until the possibility of a disastrous November 5th to make this change. Anyway, I’m grateful for somebody’s courage in this particular moment, even if there's a long way to go in actually solving the problem.
It will be interesting to see how history sees Biden as a president—my guess is, pretty average—so it’s not obvious to me that his record was “so bad” or something that he had to go, but Democrats have presented a lot of denial to the public about his health and mental state, and you can’t hide that forever. It’s not popular among Democrats to admit the limitations of certain characteristics and identities, but we deserve a leader who at least has a sharp mind if not a robust body as well. In the end, Biden was a problem of the Democrats’ own making, and yet it is still to their (and his) credit that they admitted and changed it.
We might think and say—without being completely unreasonable—that this is the difference between contemporary Democrats and Republicans. Both parties have the unenviable task of trying to appease differing complex constituencies, but at this point we have a Republican party who hasn’t backtracked on their loose-tongued, twice-impeached, now-a-felon candidate, while the Democrats are going to switch candidates on us at the last minute because things were going so badly.
Yes and no. Would the Democrats have made the change if things weren’t obviously going so badly? I doubt it. So there was some expedience in this, some desperation. They were getting bludgeoned by the felon, just as they did for the better part of 2015-2019. I don’t include 2020 there because Covid was the one variable around which Trump seemed least comfortable knowing what to do, and it’s hard to blame him for that. His departure that year from the office—his unwillingness to admit defeat and his winking at then-Vice President Mike Pence to enlist in the project of not certifying an American election—was easily the low point of his presidency.
But there is another difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in this moment other than the fact that the Republicans seem to be winning. Trump can afford to not do what Biden is doing to absurd measures because he is the de facto leader of the party at this point and (has been for a long time). The Republican platform has been more influenced by Trump’s nontraditional set of values and goals more than Trump has been influenced by typical Republicanism. And the “politer” Never Trumpers are probably gone for good.
Biden, on the other hand, is not and has never been the real leader of the Democrats. If you think back even to the primary season of 2020 he wasn’t exactly crushing it, losing in early states to Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders. I don’t know what polling was being considered and what backroom meetings occurred, but it was only when a number of the more-moderate Democrat candidates dropped out right before Super Tuesday and endorsed him that Biden’s path really opened up.
So if Biden isn’t the informal and influential leader of the Democrats, who is? I suspect for now that its still former President Barack Obama. And no matter how much you may (or may not) like Obama, it’s not a good thing for a major political party’s most important leader to be one from the past, who has no more presidential terms available. It will be interesting to see if the Democrats can find, in one month’s time before their August convention in Chicago, more of their present leadership who can become their future.