Whatever Comes Next Is Better Than Biden
5 min read
Allow me to summarize the response from outside America to the news that President Joe Biden is not running for reelection: Thank God.
Here in Britain, the most common reaction in the minutes after the news broke was sheer relief. Relief that Donald Trump will not be allowed an easy path to a second term. Relief that the Democrats will put forward a candidate who is able to bear a full campaign schedule—defending the party’s record and advancing its best arguments. Relief, too, that the party would not be insulting the intelligence of voters by insincerely pushing a candidate that its leaders must have understood was a lemon.
The last of those has dominated my thinking since the disastrous CNN debate in June. Imagine that Biden’s staffers had gently shepherded him over the line, coaching him through interviews and propping him up through public events. Imagine that Biden had somehow won the election despite the evidence of the polls—and then, disaster. Within months or weeks, it surely would have become apparent that he was unable to serve a full term.
If all of that happened, then the American people would have, quite rightly, felt that they had been duped. Any sense of the moral high ground—something the Democrats have been keen to claim in the face of Trump’s very real outrages—would have disappeared. How can you ask the voters to trust you when you don’t trust them enough to tell them the truth?
My colleague Mark Leibovich first wrote in 2022 that Joe Biden should not run again. To many of us watching from outside America, this seemed like an entirely reasonable argument, and we couldn’t understand why it got so little traction. But we looked at Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Grassley and Bernie Sanders and wondered if indulging extremely venerable politicians was just another of those inexplicable American things, like combining peanut butter and jelly. Even one of Britain’s most staid politicians, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, joked about the issue in January. Asked whether he would ever make a comeback, the then-72-year-old replied: “I’m too old to be a British politician and too young to be an American politician.”
Then came the Department of Justice’s decision not to prosecute Biden in a classified-documents case, saying that he would present himself to any future court as he did to prosecutors, as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” I wrote an article for The Atlantic confidently declaring that the issue of Biden’s age was now “unavoidable.”
I was wrong. So very wrong.
Many people found the issue only too easy to avoid. Over the next few days, I saw every possible coping strategy to ignore the argument. Trump is old too! (True, but I think he is also a terrible candidate.) This was a right-wing meme, the new Hillary Clinton’s emails! The special counsel in the classified-documents case was a Republican patsy, intent on smearing a Democratic president! Why were we discussing this, and not “Trump’s fascism”?
The answer to that last question at least was simple. If Trump is a danger to the republic, then he should face the strongest possible opponent. It has been grim to watch prominent Democratic politicians make the calculation that they should stay quiet, chalk this one up as a loss, and hang on for 2028. This complacency has also undermined the White House’s campaign message that this election is about the survival of democracy. What they said: America’s future hangs in the balance in November. What they clearly thought: This is a mere preliminary to the more interesting contest in four years’ time.
Those Washington journalists who shrugged off their peers’ attempts to raise this issue also need to reflect on their actions. The signs of Biden’s unfitness were there to see, for those who wanted to look. Too many didn’t. He was reluctant to do sit-down interviews or appear in the traditional pre–Super Bowl slot. He gave fewer press conferences than his predecessors. For more than a year, the news service Axios has run frequent stories, presumably based on leaks from worried members of his team, about Biden’s decision to wear sneakers rather than dress shoes, about his “proprioceptive maintenance maneuvers,” and about his reduced schedule. The reporting got little traction, but most of it has now been confirmed. (On one recent call meant to soothe wavering supporters, Biden instead told his audience he was not very sharp after 8 p.m. Relatable, yes. Reassuring? No.)
After the CNN debate in June, the groupthink switched from denying the problem to bewailing it. This must have felt odd to casual readers, as if everyone had been visited by the same divine revelation overnight. The legacy media, feeling chastened—and in some cases, personally humiliated—corrected with vigor. “The media is right now campaigning hard for a Democratic party loss,” the Guardian columnist Rebecca Solnit wrote on July 6 about the slew of panicked editorials. No, they were making up for lost time.
The Substack author Matt Yglesias is one of the few writers to have since revisited his reluctance to believe there was a problem. “I was, of course, aware that Joe Biden was old and showed signs of aging,” he wrote on July 8. “But I was also aware that a large share of the video ‘evidence’ of Biden’s incapacity was flagrantly clipped or cropped to give a dishonest impression.” This is polarization in action, and a reminder that liberals can’t assume that everything on Fox News is untrue.
By this summer, Joe Biden had become an 81-year-old man who whispered, frequently lost his train of thought, and had trouble with proper nouns. The idea that he should not run for a second term was not a controversial opinion here in Britain, where the new Labour government would prefer to deal with anyone other than Trump. The last Trump administration’s wild mood swings made life difficult for America’s allies, and this time, with the Ukraine war locked in a bitter stalemate, the stakes are even higher.
Well beyond Labour insiders, Trump is not popular in Britain. In fact, in favorability ratings here, he ranks below not just Barack Obama but also Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, George W. Bush, and Albert II, Prince of Monaco. Of course he should face a proper opponent: Biden has endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, while Obama has posted a statement calling for “a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.” Frankly, either a Kamala coronation or a chaotic contest at the Democratic National Convention is preferable to the totter toward oblivion that the party has just avoided. If the Democrats now run a campaign that does not nuke their downballot races or insult the intelligence of American voters, I will join the sigh of relief heard around the world, from London to Kyiv and beyond.
