He announced today that he will no longer seek the Democratic nomination for the presidency.
Although his decision is being described as a ‘shock’, this did not come to me as a surprise. Ever since his poor debate performance created doubts about his cognitive abilities, there has been an increasing number of calls from his supporters that for the good of the party and the country, he should quit. The whole process became a sort of sad deathwatch, knowing that the inevitable was near but not knowing when. I felt that Biden was going through some of the Kubler Ross five stages of grief, namely denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, and that he would at some point bow to the inevitable.
It would not have been easy for Biden to reach the acceptance stage. He is a lifelong politician whose ambition to become president was thwarted multiple times before achieving it late in life. He also had a pretty successful presidency, and must have wanted to continue it. But his tenure was marred by several bad moves, the biggest of which was his support for Israel’s horrendous treatment of the people of Gaza. That clearly angered many young people who can see injustice much more clearly than adults can and are less willing to compromise and make excuses for it.
So now the process of finding a successor begins.
I have never seen a presidential race like this one. On the Republican side you have an absolutely awful liar and narcissist grifter who has somehow managed to captivate a large number of supporters and bully his entire party leadership into groveling before him. On the Democratic side, you have a process in which they have less than four months to find a new nominee and rally support for them. The experience of other countries that do not have such an insanely long election process suggests that this timetable is feasible, though for Americans it will be novel.
I’m surprised but not surprised.
This decision of Biden’s makes me respect him a lot more rather than less.
It’s not easy to have all the fame and power of the US presidency and then voluntarily give it up, even for a compelling reason.
It’s never been too clear to me just how cognitively impaired Biden is. People close to him are all over the place with their claims.
Hollywood scriptwriters have already begun pounding their keyboards for “inside” docudramas about this decision -- I visualize Dustin Hoffman’s agent on the phone saying his client will not star in any made-for-tv movies, thankewyoujustthesame.
Meanwhile, we get to watch how fast the Democrats can improvise a circular firing squad (fortunately, they have lots of practice).
Amazing how much influence on history a too-large spoonful of Nyquil, an hour too late, can have. (Though of course the corporate “news” would have pounced on any Biden stumble, figurative or literal, in the exact same way, having only the two modes of obsessive or amnesiac.)
I am childish enough to quote myself from your Feb 13th post, “Biden vs. Trump on the age issue”.
When the pundit class say it is too late for the Democrats to get their campaign together, Jon Stewart pointed out Britain organised their election campaign in just one month.
And France had time to organise “two elections…and found time to have an affair with Denmark at the same time”!
Kamala Harris is perfect for reminding voters the Republicans regard “A Handmaid’s Tale” as an instructional film.
And JD Vance has no chance in a debate against whichever experienced Veep the Democrats pick. In fact, Vance is just a liability, he brings nothing to the table. Except a book where he wrote he m*sturbated in an inside out glove (gross).
Kamala Harris just got good polling results. 🙂
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=CPI9fLLmK9I
That is in no way clear to me.
As for the distinction between ‘young people’ and ‘adults’, I find that a bit opaque, too.
(Is an 18-yo a young person or an adult? A 21-yo?)
It was painful to watch Biden double down on remaining when the writing was already on the wall
The more I think about it, the more I think this whole thing could have been planned by Biden and the Democratic Party months ago.
The plan goes like this:
1. Let everyone think Biden will be running again.
2. Let all the attacks be directed at Biden for months. Let the republican donors spend tons of money on attacking Biden.
3. Don’t push back too hard about Biden’s age, that is Biden’s primary weakness and let the republicans and press have a field day about how old Biden is.
4. After the RNC, when they anoint Trump, but before the DNC, have Biden reluctantly, as an elder statesman, withdraw from the race.
5. With about 100 days left before the election, and with a well-organized DNC which throws it’s entire support to the new candidate, and a massive media campaign to build support, some public enthusiasm can be built. Even ads saying how old Trump is and how responsive the Democratic Party was to listen to the public. Yes, there is an obvious Republican take on this, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
6. The republicans are caught flat-footed, and have to ditch all the attack ads against Biden and have to rapidly make new attack ads against the new candidate.
On the Republican side of things we can expect the initial anti-Harris ads within a couple weeks. But because of the shortness of time, those ads are likely to be suggesting that she is not qualified because she is a woman of color. This will not play well with independents, who like to see themselves as above choosing a candidate based on gender or skin color. Even if the independents would prefer a white man, they might choose Harris simply to prove to themselves that they are not swayed by those factors. Further, blatant attack ads based on skin color or gender can backfire and make those candidates more appealing out of a sense of fair play. There will also be a lot of ads saying Harris isn’t eligible because even though she is a natural-born citizen, her parents were not. Birtherism will be back, but the democratic party and the media will be more prepared for it this time.
If the decision was made some time ago we can expect some very professional Harris ads within a couple days, i.e. they were in the can ready for this announcement. If this really was a decision by Biden only in the last couple days the professional Harris ads are not likely to be available for a couple weeks.
At the moment I have no evidence to justify the possibility that this plan was worked out months ago. But it’s a little too pat for this to happen just after the RNC and just before the DNC, at a perfect time to throw a wench into the plans of their opponents. We probably won’t know until the books start being written.
Harris already has it lined up. That seems to be one thing the Democrats did right, don’t have Biden step down until there is plan for what happens after. This far in the campaign season that means being ready to put another candidate at the head of the ticket. Weeks of sudden mini primary campaigning for votes at the convention would just give the Trump campaign free campaign time.
Yes the Democrats would get a lot of coverage but much of it would go to people who don’t get the nomination, so it’s mostly wasted.
Oh, fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. We just lost a key, and in a must-win-or-we-all-die election too.
I don’t think anybody has. Not since the 1850s or so, anyway.
Biden’s still as sharp as a tack (and as gaffe-prone as he ever was). The whole thing was orchestrated by the wealthy donor class to get rid of the Prez who’d inflicted Lina Khan on their monopolistic asses. I just wonder what they did that made him finally throw in the towel? Blackmail of some sort?
The bigger question being who spiked it? Right under the watchful noses of the Secret Ser … oh, right. That’d be the same bunch of Keystone Kops who almost accidentally saved the world by letting Trump get shot in the face? Nevermind.
It is interesting to see how the election campaign will play out in Florida. Right now, polls suggest Harris would do worse than Biden but if the campaign mostly is about abortion an increased participation by women voters can make Florida a possible swing state. And remember how badly the Republican candidates have been doing in the isolated elections after the midterms; something not anticipated by polling.
@flex, 8: you called it! I suspect Biden did wait for after the RNC, when the vaguely-bearded Trump-wannabe got the VP nod.
And Donald Trump is having a meltdown and demanding a reimbursement of all the campaign money he spent running against Biden. It’s sheer comedy. As if he pays for anything himself, anyway…
This is ludicrous nonsense. If the debate fiasco was not sufficient evidence of serious cognitive decline (which it was, despite the sequence of absurd excuses offered for Biden’s lamentable performance), there were the subsequent unscripted events, in which he repeatedly got tangled up in his replies to questions, with convoluted sentences tailing of into “Anyway…” as he lost his train of thought. Even before the debate, in retrospect there were alarming signs, such as his reluctance to give press conferences (or his team’s reluctance to let him) -- he did far fewer than Obama or even Trump; and some of his “gaffes”, like referring to long-dead world leaders such as Kohl and Mitterand as if they were still in power -- suggestive of the kind of reversion to earlier periods of life that is typical of dementia. Try comparing the Biden of, say, the Stephanopoulos interview with the Biden of the 2020 campaign -- the contrast is stark and shocking. And his response in that interview, when Stephanopoulos asked how he would feel if he lost to Trump, showed that at that point he was thinking about the matter purely in terms of his own ego. We should all be grateful he was finally brought to realise that he had to withdraw for the good of party and country (and, I’d add, world).