A few days on, I remain convinced that President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week has led to a crisis of his campaign, and by extension, of American democracy. The election of Donald Trump would, by both Trump’s own stated intention and past example, result in an unprecedented assault on the rule of law, basic freedoms, public safety, and national security. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity today guaranties that no guardrails remain to protect the country against his most outlandish plans for a second term. And beyond the disasters that Trump himself would unleash, his election would open the floodgates to all manner of reactionary mayhem by his right-wing allies in the GOP. There can be no question that just over four months from the election, Biden’s debate failures made Trump’s return to power more likely. The Biden campaign and Democrats should be spending every day reminding Americans of the danger of Trump and the authoritarian GOP, and of a positive alternative vision for the country; instead, we are bogged down with rightly worrying about Biden’s capacity to serve a second term. Such worries are a rational response to what we all saw last week. Saying that everyone has bad days does not cut it; a president doesn’t have the luxury to have some off days during which he can’t complete a sentence, express a thought, or adequately confront a dangerous adversary.
Biden’s performance was so upsetting for so many of us because it not only confirmed some of the severest doubts about his health and mental capabilities, it also raised the possibility of more disasters to come during the remainder of the campaign. Even if Biden manages to impress and reassure in upcoming appearances, his debate performance has planted a ticking time bomb of anger, disarray, and hopelessness in the Democratic base and larger public that’s primed to go off should there be a future display of similar ineptitude. A couple months of high-octane Joementum, chock full of town hall meetings, feats of age-appropriate derring-do, and spontaneous eloquence, could be blown to kingdom come by a single repeat of Debate Debacle 2024.
It’s not sufficient for his defenders to say that Biden simply had a bad night, or that a diminished Biden would make a better president than a hyperactive Trump, even if we accept that both are true. The Biden that we saw last week did not appear to be qualified to be president, full stop. Biden owes it to Americans to reassure them as to his ability to serve another four years. You cannot point to his record as proof, because the shortcomings in question have to do with his age and diminished abilities going forward. For his defenders, and for leaders in the Democratic Party, to essentially argue that it would be better to have an incompetent president than Trump is an insult to voters, and a recipe not just for disaster in November, but for public trust in the Democratic Party out into the future. I think that Ezra Klein is on to something when he writes, in response to the debate and its fallout:
[R]ather than act as a check on Biden’s decisions and ambitions, the party has become an enabler of them. An enforcer of them. It is giving the American people an option they do not want and then threatening them with the end of democracy if they do not take it. Democrats like to say that democracy is on the ballot. But it isn’t. Biden is on the ballot. There are plenty of voters who might want to vote for democracy but do not want to vote for Biden.
While I disagree with Klein’s assertion that democracy isn’t on the ballot — though he is literally correct, this election is most certainly symbolically a referendum on whether the U.S. remains a democracy or slides into authoritarian, one-party rule — it is in fact not a tenable position for Democratic Party leaders to dismiss widespread, good-faith concerns that Joe Biden is not fit for another term. As Klein also rightly points out, the Democrats would be fully capable of replacing Biden if a specific health crisis forced him off the ballot. Does it really serve America’s pro-democracy party to ignore concerns that a president might not be able to do his job?
At least in political commentary, how one answers the question of whether Biden should make way for another candidate is largely tracking with individual views of how relatively destructive it would be for the Democrats to choose another candidate. I haven’t see any advocates of resignation say that this would be risk-free, though some, like Klein, argue that a contested convention could end up exciting the public and charging up a renewed Democratic campaign to stop Trump. On the other hand are those who warn of the dangers of such an unprecedented maneuver, pointing to the intraparty conflicts it could unleash, with frequent emphasis on the destabilizing effect if Vice President Kamala Harris were passed over or defeated as the substitute candidate. Some also note the lack of vetting the candidate would receive in comparison to Biden, laying the groundwork for savage Republican attacks on undisclosed or untested weaknesses. I would say that on balance, more of the people whose political instincts I trust the most are currently arguing that a Biden withdrawal carries too high a risk of chaos.
Personally, I remain in the camp of giving Biden another chance, along the lines I described before, at least in this interim period as we wait for polling to capture the extent of the hit Biden’s chances have taken due to his debate performance. I wrote that Biden must lay out a clear, convincing plan to demonstrate he is fit for another term. In a weekend column, E.J. Dionne gets more specific about what such a plan might look like:
He needs to do a series of televised interviews, including many in less than friendly settings. He’ll have to step up his campaign appearances, offering more speeches along the lines of his energetic performance in North Carolina on Friday.
He should make a major commitment to doing all he can to strengthen the campaigns of Democratic House and Senate candidates, the most vulnerable of whom have more reason than anyone to worry about the electoral impact of a weakened Biden. He needs to use last week’s demonstration of the Supreme Court’s radical right-wing activism to underscore the long-term impact of the choices voters will be making this November. If Democrats lose both the Senate and the White House, the damage to the judiciary over a generation will be catastrophic.
Dionne is on the right track here, which as I see it would have two major elements —providing reassurance that Biden is physically and mentally up to the job through public appearances, while simultaneously emphasizing that he understands that the stakes of this race are much bigger than him. My personal preference involves Biden making a particularly direct, honest pitch to younger voters, with particular emphasis on the environment, college debt, and the immorality of GOP white supremacism that directly threatens the social and economic prospects of America’s diverse upcoming generations.
There’s no getting around that this is an ugly, upsetting, and deeply absurd situation. Donald Trump must be stopped, along with the reactionary GOP that seeks to erase decades if not centuries of social progress and basic freedoms. It very much feels like pro-democracy forces are fighting with one hand tied behind their back as so much energy — much of it necessary, at least in the wake of the debate — is channeled into discussions of Biden’s future. The Biden campaign and Democrats, if they choose to retain Biden, must find a way to decisively change the dynamics of this race to focus on Trump’s perfidy, the GOP’s radicalism, the right-wing Supreme Court’s usurpation of power, and the racist, misogynistic forces that bind together the reactionary backlash fueling them all. As today’s Supreme Court ruling should make blindingly clear, the threat to American society and government comes not simply from Trump, but from an authoritarian Republican Party that sees the former president as its instrument of vengeance and control. The Supreme Court’s right-wing majority has now cemented its role of not only as a defender of Trump’s coup attempt, but of all future crimes he commits in office, joining congressional Republicans in protecting him from the consequence of his anti-democratic actions. To the greatest extent possible, the election must be presented as a referendum on American democracy, not a referendum on Joe Biden.