Commentator

Dear Joe and Co, please stop holding the country hostage

Let’s put together something of a timeline on this:

• In a campaign appearance in March 2020, Biden said, “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.” That was generally seized upon as evidence that Biden was committing himself to a one-term presidency, but it wasn’t actually a pledge and that wasn’t actually the case. As a Politico piece from 2019 described Biden’s thinking, “Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisors fear could turn him into a lame duck.”

  The Politico piece quoted a long succession of Biden advisor-types saying reassuring things about how everybody was on the same page. “He’s going into this thinking, ‘I want to find a running mate I can turn things over to after four years but if that’s not possible or doesn’t happen then I’ll run for reelection,’” an unnamed ‘top advisor’ said.

• By the summer of 2022, it already should have been obvious that it was time for Biden to make good on the ‘bridge’ premise. A New York Times/Siena College poll in July revealed that 64% of Democrats wanted Biden to step aside.

  Really, that poll should have ended the Biden presidency. Already, the vultures were circling — with Gavin Newsom in particular testing the waters for a possible run. But, in the midterms, an expected ‘red wave’ never materialized. The Democrats still did lose, but the better-than-expected showing lent credence to a ‘stay the course’ policy on the Democrats’ side and Biden — whether fairly or not — took credit for giving the party its sense of stability. David Axelrod described Biden as having a “little giddyup in his step” after the results.

  

  Biden with a little giddyup

• The key events were happening behind the scenes, though. Biden not only had made up his mind that he was running — the ‘bridge’ premise having been long forgotten, whether or not Biden ever actually meant it — but he moved aggressively to head off primary challengers. I keep coming back to this Politico article from late November in which reporter Jonathan Martin inadvertently witnessed Newsom’s rather craven backtrack. “I’m all in, put me in coach. We have your back,” Martin overheard Newsom saying on the phone to Biden. But there was another line from the article that exposed the dynamics even more acutely: “I’ve told everyone in the White House, from the chief of staff to the first lady [that I won’t run],” Newsom said. Which means, in other words, that there was a full-court press on — Biden not only ignoring his dire polling but dispatching all possible surrogates to quash potential challenges.

• Nothing really changed throughout 2023. A CNN poll in September found that almost exactly the same percentages of Democrats — 66% — would have preferred anybody other than Biden winning the nomination; and an astonishing 74% of voters doubted that Biden had the “stamina or mental sharpness” to serve as president.

• But the Biden team — and the mainstream media — glided straight past all these concerns. As exceptions, David Ignatius, in September 2023, wrote a Washington Post column calling for Biden to step aside. Nate Silver said the same that month. David Brooks broached the subject in an October column. James Carville spoke actively on the subject. Dean Phillips deserves a profile in courage for allowing himself to be branded a pariah and challenging Biden in the primaries — in the hopes that others in the party would take courage from his example. No one did. As Ezra Klein put it recently, “Any individual politician or Joe Biden staffer or adviser or confidant who stepped out of line and said privately or publicly that Joe Biden shouldn’t run faced real career risk. Whereas saying nothing did not pose a risk.”

  

  Dean Phillips’ profile in courage

• In February/March, a pair of events raised the question again. Special counsel Robert Hur broke through the stonewall surrounding the president long enough to have a five-hour conversation with him, of which he reported that Biden came across as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” And a New York Times/Siena poll found that Trump led Biden by four points in a head-to-head match (and, interestingly, that Nikki Haley, who was still running, led Biden by 11 points).

  In the midst of this, Ezra Klein led a procession of pundits to call for Biden to step down — Michelle Goldberg and Maureen Dowd also joined in — but that chorus abruptly died away in the wake of Biden’s passable State of the Union.

• Meanwhile, from the Biden camp, a new narrative had emerged: that polls missed Biden’s unique connection with the American people and were not to be trusted; and that the elite media, The New York Times in particular, was out to get Biden. Michael Tyler, the director of communications for the Biden campaign, dismissed the New York Times/Siena poll by saying, “Polling continues to be at odds with how Americans vote, and consistently overestimates Donald Trump while underestimating President Biden.” New York Magazine, which became the sounding board for the Biden team’s complaints, reported, “Washington’s chatterers in particular simply don’t get Biden as a politician, and certainly not his appeal to voters.” And Kate Bedingfield, former Biden Communications Director, said, “The life of a New York Times editorial board member is not the same as a union member in Michigan who’s trying to fill the table for their family every evening.”

• To me, it was this narrative that made it abundantly clear just how lost-in-its-own-bubble the Biden team really was. For one thing, as the Bedingfield quote unwittingly revealed, Biden-world was very far behind the times. Union workers in Michigan were of course going to vote for Biden. The issue was the vast swathes of the American work force who were in at-will jobs, with no protections, who had gone for Trump before and were very likely to do so again. And an-inside-baseball-yet-nonetheless-very-revealing-story this April made it evident that the Biden inner circle had gotten completely swept up in its own us-versus-the-world narratives. The Biden White House had felt itself entitled to dictate the terms of its coverage to The New York Times — and had become seriously irked whenever the Times dared to publish critical stories on the president, particularly on his age. Elizabeth Bumiller, the Times’ Washington Bureau Chief, was left to sigh, “They are not realistic about what we do for a living.” In any case, it was very clear that the Biden team simply wasn’t getting it — they seemed genuinely to think that The New York Times had sway over swing voters, and that if they could just lean a little harder on outlets like The Times then the negative coverage of Biden’s age would disappear.

• Going into the pivotal decision-making this week, the question is to what extent anybody else has influence over Biden. “If this is Biden, who’s been running our country?” Nellie Bowles asks at The Free Press, but in a Substack post, Jeremy Carl has a more nuanced assessment of what the dynamic has likely been. As President, everything Biden does is choreographed, every action he takes is the result of extensive pre-briefing,” Carl wrote. “Every day, Biden has thousands of people working overtime to overcome his decline and hide his shortcomings. When you’re in the reality distortion field of the White House, it’s easy to pretend that the bad days aren’t really so bad, especially when the media is working overtime to cover for you.” Or to put it another way: the Biden inner circle and Biden are seamlessly aligned. He has almost no one from outside who is able to reach him — he has “employees, not advisors,” James Carville said this week. "He’s famous for having really, really loyal people,” Elaine Kamarck said a bit euphemistically. And the responses by Biden’s circle — that he ‘had a cold,’ that it was ‘a bad day,’ that he just needed to fire the advisors responsible for his debate prep — all revealed a continuing sense of unreality, providing a glimpse into an administration that had somehow convinced itself that the press was out to get them and that Biden was the only possible person who could run the country.

• In the end — as is usually the way with powerful people — everybody surrounding Biden is a reflection of him, and the core of Biden seems, unfortunately, to be….not that great. In a coruscating exposé on Biden, written in 2012, long-time staffer and ‘Biden guy’ Jeff Connaughton described Biden as opportunistic and self-serving, somebody who charged forward endlessly without giving much thought to what the impact of his actions would be on anyone else. At a pivotal moment in Connaughton’s narrative, when he wants Biden to make a call on his behalf and Biden declines to do so, a veteran politico, someone who had known Biden a long time, pulls Connaughton aside and tells him, “Jeff, don’t take this personally. He’s an equal opportunity disappointer.”

  

  Biden with family, 1987

  That’s where we’ve gotten to with Biden after Thursday — all of us equally disappointed. There was the premise of Biden as honorable civil servant, Biden as the ‘bridge’ figure who could save the country from Trump. But the Biden we’re left with in the end is the one Connaughton saw — holding onto power long after he should have given it up, deliberately squashing any chance at ensuring an orderly succession, and holding the country hostage as a result.