Until last week the friendly wagers (low-stakes, an Old Hickory on the table) I made with my wife and sons two years ago that Joe Biden wouldn’t be the Democratic nominee in 2024 was looking shaky. The reasoning, I figured, was clear. Biden likely won in 2020 by the fluke of an asterisk election—because Covid curtailed all traditional campaigning, which was a favor to Donald Trump’s visibly feeble challenger, and voting was catch-as-catch-can—and forced to hold rallies this year and at least occasionally speak to the press, somebody in his family or circle of advisers would convince him to stand down, and take credit for… fill in the blank, that one stumps me.
Special counsel Robert Hur—a Republican appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, who’s become a semi-Zelig figure in the past decade—popped the balloon of Democrats expecting that Biden, despite inflation, the border mayhem and resistance from progressives over his defense of Israel, would likely prevail over Trump, the legally-challenged and still as crazy as Captain Beefheart pretended to be in the era of “crazy is cool, man.” I now like my chances at collecting some dollars from the family (for the record, I don’t mean to take the election lightly, but who doesn’t bet on almost everything today?).
The buzzards are circling and Biden’s scalp is ripe, with his retirement likely fairly soon, perhaps by April 15th. The New York Times, ostensibly anti-Trump, is laying the groundwork for a direct call for Biden to step aside, foreshadowed by its surfeit by news stories and columns in the past week.
A Feb. 9th editorial, warning that Trump now has “a very real chance of retaking the White House,” proposed a plan for President Shrinkage, a last-ditch strategy that the editorial board surely knows won’t occur. The writer: “The president has to reassure and build confidence with the public by doing things that he has so far been unwilling to do convincingly. He needs to be out campaigning with voters far more in unrehearsed interactions. He could undertake more town hall meetings in communities and on national television. He should hold regular news conferences to demonstrate his command of and direction for leading the country… The combination of Mr. Biden’s age and his absence from the public stage [the paper criticized him for skipping a softball pre-Super Bowl interview for the second consecutive year] has eroded the public’s confidence. He looks as if he’s hiding, or worse, being hidden.”
Will Biden take the advice of holding more “unrehearsed interactions” and campaigning across the country (or at least in battleground states) from now until November? Not a chance, a fact that Democratic media and Biden’s inner (and outer) circle knows. It’s still February, so the Times editorial board, and columnists from Maureen Dowd to David French to Bret Stephens, virulent Trump-detractors all, are attempting to be polite and holding off on suggesting on how a Biden “retirement” would take place and who he’d be replaced with to face the former president (assuming he’s not convicted of a disqualifying crime) in November. Maybe it’s because Vice President Kamala Harris is a low-approval lightweight; or that entreaties to Michelle Obama have been rebuffed; or that California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who’s younger and looks like someone a Hollywood studio would cast as president, is male and white, and more importantly, presides over a state that’s losing population and has cities petrified by crime. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, young (52) and popular, seems to make sense, but then again, she represents Michigan, a state that’s divided over the Mideast war.
Maureen Dowd, if you read between the lines, is preparing to throw out substitute candidates. She writes: “Jill Biden and his other advisers come up with ways to obscure signs of senescence—from shorter news conferences to almost zero print interviews to TV interviews with fawning MSNBC anchors. But many Americans are quite concerned about the 81-year-old president’s crepuscular mien.”
Perhaps when Biden loses MSNBC that’ll provide cover for the rest of the media to outline Biden succession plans. That gives the silly cable network (I think they’re all silly) too much credit, but it could be the equivalent of Barry Goldwater, John Rhodes and Hugh Scott on Aug. 7th 1974, telling Richard Nixon his Republican support had evaporated. Nixon announced his resignation the next day.
Not everyone at the Times is ready to make Biden walk the plank. The increasingly creepy Paul Krugman tells readers for the second time in a week that he’s met with Biden recently and President Sippy Cup “is completely lucid and with excellent grasp of detail.” Also, that Biden has a “sense of humor” and speaks slowly because of The Stutter, which most Americans hadn’t heard of until the 2020 election. Krugman’s having a bad fur week: “Watching the frenzy over [Biden’s age], I am, for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.”
I don’t know many people who find Krugman “profound,” but I guess he does.
My friend Ken Silber, a conservative who jumped to the Democrats after Trump’s weird ascension, wrote on Monday for Splice Today that he’s skeptical about the “brouhaha” over Biden’s age, speculating that the wisdom he’s accrued over his 81 years is a strength, not a liability. He concludes: “It occurred to me that many people weighing in online about Biden’s mental capacity were likely sitting in front of a computer for hours. These keyboard warriors should do something more active and social to protect their own mental and physical abilities.”
Can’t argue with that, but I’d remind Ken that the “keyboard warriors,” which include the likes of Krugman, aren’t President of the United States, a job that’s grueling, tense and physically demanding for a person of any age, let alone one who’s 81 and publicly demonstrating mental decline.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023
