If Joe Biden continues to insist on remaining the nominee, I devoutly hope that he wins, and will do what I can to help that happen. But for that to be the right choice, I hope you’ll agree, that path will have to be the one that looks the most likely path for our defeating Donald Trump in November.
Biden himself has told us that the survival of American Democracy and the Rule of Law are at stake in this election, and with stakes so great as that, the only criterion for who should head the ticket is, “Who’s most likely to win?”
Do you agree that all other considerations are essentially irrelevant, when the survival of American democracy depends on our winning the election?
Should Biden remain the Democratic nominee? Yes if he’s the one most likely to win. But definitely not if someone else could improve our chances.
If he steps down, should Kamala Harris be the one to replace him as the presidential candidate? Yes, if nominating Kamala Harris is the best way of getting to victory in November.
But if someone else would be more likely than either Joe or Kamala to win, that someone else should be the nominee.
I would think that everyone who agrees about the stakes in this election would agree with all those statements.
Judging the probabilities of different scenarios succeeding — how likely is Biden to win? Harris? Newsom? Whitmer — is anything but easy. The future is notoriously hard to predict.
But we’ve got to judge the consequences of our alternative choices as best as we can. And act accordingly.
When it comes to making that judgment, I’ve been puzzled by how much the “Biden should stay on the ticket” point of view has dominated on Daily Kos. (When I wrote a piece based on my having come to a different conclusion, two days after the debate, almost everyone weighing in with comments told me I was mistaken.
I admit I could be mistaken. But what’s puzzled me has been how different the balance of opinion on Daily Kos is on the “step down” question from what I’ve been encountering in conversations with a lot of other knowledgeable people I know, with whom I’ve discussed our post-debate crisis.
Most of them think that Biden has been so damaged now — by the perceptions of how age has diminished him, on the very dimension that’s been his main electoral vulnerability for many months — that it’s just too risky to gamble everything on our ability to get an American majority to choose him over the Fascist dictator heading the Republican ticket.
Given the near unanimity that shows up on Daily Kos on this issue, I feel fearful about expressing my dissent from that consensus. Let me just say, in my defense, that I am an honest person that has no purpose here but to do what I can to help achieve the victory in November on which depends the survival of America-as-we-have-known-it. If I’m wrong, it’s an honest attempt at a valid assessment.
Here’s why I have strong doubts that Biden meets the one criterion of most likely to win. The poll that seems most important to me is the one that says that 72 percent of Americans regard Biden as unfit for another term, because of what they think they see about what his 81+ years have done and are doing to him.
I heard one voter declare, “I’d vote for Biden even if he were dead!” And so, by-God, would I. And I expect a lot of others here as well.
But the question is, who will win. Winning takes a whole lot of votes, and I I don’t think that enough of that 72 percent will vote for Biden believing what they believe.
I’ve become a really big fan of Biden’s since that time in the 2020 nomination process, as the Party approached the South Carolina primary, and James Clyburn stepped up to give us what Democrats had determined was their best chance of keeping Trump from a second term. And I’ve been impressed with a great deal of what he’s done with his term in office.
But this has not seemed like his finest hour— not just how he proved so disastrously unable to rise to the occasion in that debate with Trump (however that gets interpreted), but also with how he has been dealing with the crisis into which that performance precipitated not only him but all of us who care deeply about keeping this would-be Fascist dictator from gaining the power to destroy what’s best about America.
It is not his finest hour, for example, when he declares to George Stephanopoulos that he has not undergone any cognitive testing and he has no interest in doing so. If the challenge he faces is to bring as many as possible of that 72 percent who think him unfit to change their minds, I would think he’d rush to take such a test to prove they needn’t worry.
In recent months, I was able to get an idea into the Biden inner circle. I proposed that Biden challenge Trump: both would submit to a full slate of physical and cognitive tests (at a place like Mayo) with the agreement that the results be made public.
Trump has been showing signs of an accelerating decline into some form of dementia, apparently, and I felt pretty confident that Biden would come out looking like a more fit old guy to wield the important powers of the presidency. Biden may have lost a step, as some have put it, but Trump might be exposed as “deranged.”
But now Biden is the focus, and he declines to use such testing to show that 72 percent that their concerns are unwarranted.
If Biden is indeed able to look fit in cognitive tests, he should be glad to get that assessment and make it public. His telling Stephanopoulos he’s not interested makes him look like he’s got something to hide, or at least that he doesn’t understand what makes him look so risky to so many of us who care deeply about preserving American democracy in the upcoming election.
Another way Biden seems perhaps not to understand the nature of this moment, and what’s required of him, is revealed in another part of the Stephanopoulos interview. Making a case for himself, Biden recites a litany of his truly important accomplishments these last four years: he beat Trump, he has a record of significant domestic accomplishments, he rebuilt NATO, he played brilliantly the role of “leader of the free world” to make the Russian fascist dictator fail in his unprovoked attack on Ukraine, etc.
Yes, he’s entitled to considerable acclaim for the job he’s done. But he doesn’t seem to recognize the irrelevancy of all that to this moment, where the only question is how to we win the election so the constitutional order our Founders gave us survives. That 72 percent that thinks that age has made him unfit have witnessed his term in the presidency, and that litany of first-term achievements is not making him look very strong for the coming electoral showdown.
I’m skeptical that a valid case can be made that Biden is the strongest candidate we can nominate, but such factors as these lead me to believe that Biden is not understanding the situation well enough that his holding on is based on some such good case. He seems somehow involved at some personal, ego level that has made him dug in on seeking another term, rather than having the needs of the nation governing his choice.
(Just as he so admirably put the needs of the nation first when he declared he didn’t want the powers the Supreme Court just gave him, to commit a whole variety of crimes, acting like a dictator, it should be clear that he’s putting an objective assessment of the needs of the nation first in making his decision about whether to stay in or bow out. But that’s not how it looks.)
The very fact that Biden’s declarations — “I’m running,” and only God could persuade him to do otherwise — have not quieted the chorus of prominent voices telling him to step down should be evidence enough that sticking with Biden is not a winning course. It’s the monster and would-be dictator Trump, not Biden, that the nation needs to be looking at.
Even if people like me shut up and acquiesce in Biden’s decision, if Biden stays in the question of his fitness will remain, distracting Americans from the main truth about this political moment, i.e. that a victory for Donald Trump in November would change the basic nature of American polity from Democracy to Fascism.
So I welcome the news that Senator Mark Warner is seeking to gather a delegation to meet with the President to persuade him to step down. Warner has concluded that this is what’s best for the preservation of our heritage as Americans, and I think it highly probable that he’s right. And obviously, he’s concluded that — despite all of Biden’s pronouncements of determination — the outcome of this crisis might yet go a better way.
As a Virginian, I am proud that my Senator is taking the initiative to do what’s in his power to do to help get us to what he’s concluded is the necessary outcome: which is Biden’s withdrawing (presumably with a powerful a noble statement, and then then playing a constructive role to get us to our best possible ticket for winning in November).
Like Senator Warner, I’m doing all I can toward that same best-possible outcome.
To wit, I’ve come up with an idea that might help Warner succeed in his mission. I’ve made a brief — 5-minute — video to express that idea, and am trying to get it to Senator Warner before any meeting on Monday he may get with President Biden. The chances of his seeing it soon are looking pretty good.
I will post that brief — 5-minute video — separately. It’s title is “How Senator Warner Might Persuade Biden to Step Down.”