Biden reassures the Democrats … with a big stick
This was the week when Democrats finally started to act like Republicans…
That’s right. Many became creatures of supine passivity in the face of a failing incumbent putting his selfish ambition ahead of the good of the country.
But let’s rejoin the story a week ago, when the party, led by a candidate unfit to win re-election, had started to voice their concern. Some muttered about finally doing something about the Biden problem. Talk of alternative future timelines began to seep out into the public. Dream tickets were dreamed about. Democrats whispered the names Whitmer and Shapiro into their pillows. Others, more realistically, began to see Kamala Harris as though she were lit by god rays. Believers began to see the light. Could she? Could she? Could she be… The Chosen One?
In the cold light of day, meetings were convened. Donors openly expressed their frustration. One major cashpot to the Democratic Party, Abigail Disney (yes, that Disney), told CNBC she would stop funding the party until the President sees sense: “If Biden does not step down the Democrats will lose. Of that, I am absolutely certain. The consequences for the loss will be genuinely dire.” Now even George Clooney is complaining to The New York Times, writing on Wednesday: “[O]ur party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign.”
On podcasts, there’s widespread talk about the 25th Amendment, the provision made in the US Constitution for removing a president deemed unfit for office. Momentum seemed to be gathering. It’s no longer a matter of if Biden goes, but when he “does the right thing” and steps down…
And then the pushback came, and it was as crudely effective as its success was entirely without merit.
Biden was belligerent, dare one even say stubborn. His removal would enrage his base, he threatened, using his black caucus as his strongest defence, as it has so often proved in the past. Ignored in this threat is the reality that Harris would also be certain to win support in key demographics. Ignored too is that her polling remains as good as (if not better than) Biden’s in matchups against Trump, and that’s before she’s had a chance to campaign on her own merits.
But that’s hardly the point to Biden. He tells his party to challenge him at the Convention in August, knowing there’s no mechanism for such a challenge. He goes further, using his influence with friendly media to spin an alternative reality. Meanwhile, his people get angry with anybody asking questions, blaming reporters for creating a story from nothing. In an extraordinarily bad-tempered press conference, White House Press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, stonewalled requests for medical information. “It doesn’t matter how hard you push me,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how angry you get with me from here.”
The result among much of the Democratic Party and its supporters in the media has been a slow-moving capitulation in the face of this spluttering White House machine, whose ability to spew stories and clarifications to stories has only been matched by its total inability to articulate a solid defence of the worst presidential debate performance of any candidate in the history of US presidential debates.
It’s worth restating that.
Many Democrats seem to have forgotten this stark reality or worse. The capitulation of the party to Joe Biden has been almost… Trumpian.
Even Mark Warner, the senator from Virginia, has stepped back from the edge. He’d arranged a meeting with fellow Democrats to discuss the situation, but now that meeting has been cancelled. He instead took to social media with a statement that reached Mitch McConnell’s levels of go-nowhere effectiveness. “I believe”, he wrote, “it is incumbent upon the President to more aggressively make his case to the American people and to hear directly from a broader group of voices about how to best prevent Trump’s lawlessness from returning to the White House.”
Senator Michael Bennet, from Colorado, admitted the Democrat’s imminent fear. “Donald Trump is on track I think to win this election and maybe win it by a landslide and take with him the Senate and the House” he said, whilst notably refusing to call for Biden to step aside.
No Democrat from the Senate has yet to make that call.
Instead, talk is turning to winning down the ballot, to ensure that even if Trump does take the White House, the damage he could do would be limited by a House and Senate in Democrat hands. It is defeatism in all but name yet entirely unlikely, even if it is justified.
The logic of Democrats winning the November election was always predicated on the underlying reality of America, and what US historian, Allan Lichtman, calls ‘the Keys to the White House’. It’s not quite as crude as that because there are more than the thirteen “keys” in his model. The fourteenth key would be that America has no great enthusiasm for another Trump term, beyond the minority rump of MAGA voters. Then there’s the fifteenth key: abortion. The sixteenth: the Supreme Court’s crazy ruling effectively elevating the president above the law. The seventeenth: the craziness of Project 2025, which would install Trump in perpetuity as the Great American Dictator… We could go on. There are a lot of keys.
But all that presumed that the President would go out and make a strong defence of the past four years and, more generally, in support of American democracy. It assumes that Biden would do what incumbent presidents need to do to win re-election: do two or three campaign stops every day for the next few months. He would need to be seen pressing the flesh of some non-trivial number of American voters, especially in swing states. He would need to be debating in town hall settings every few days.
Now Democrats are wondering if Biden has the strength to do any of that.
Biden has rightly earned a lot of latitude among Democrats. What they required was the absolute minimum: a reasonable explanation about that performance. Just some good reason that would stop people talking about Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or some other ongoing mental decline.
The White House has done nothing to allay fears in the past week. Instead, they’ve said that Biden would no longer do any work after 8 pm (doing nothing to counter Trump’s lazy, but now it appears prescient, “Sleepy Joe” slur). They arranged a sit-down interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, which should have been a chance to prove doubters wrong, but the interview was a mere 22 minutes, underscoring rather than disproving that Biden has a problem with stamina. (Stephanopoulos has since been recorded on the street when a passerby asked if he thought Biden should step down. He replied he doesn’t believe Biden can serve another four years.)
In addition, it is increasingly evident that Biden is being heavily managed, working almost entirely from a teleprompter or in controlled settings. He made a “surprise” phone call to the MSNBC show, Morning Joe, on Monday, though host Mika Brzezinski hardly looked surprised. She had been solidly pro-Joe since the debate debacle and has always been close to this White House. More sobering was the turnaround of her husband and fellow host, Joe Scarborough. A former Republican, he had been one of the most vocal critics of Biden’s debate performance, before disappearing for a few days, leaving Brzezinski to do the cleanup. By the time he returned on air, his attitude had changed. Suddenly the show was back to being committed to a second Biden term.
So, the rebellion fizzles out before it even began…
Or so Biden and his team will hope. The reality is that the President cannot stumble again yet careful media management will not be enough. The rebellion is smouldering. As H.L. Mencken once observed. “It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.”
Joe Biden’s victory might only be a pause, as Democrats await their few determined leaders.
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