The Fate of Democracy Isn't a Decision for One Man

Nobody in power recognizes when they should step down

Jul 09, 2024

George Stephanopoulos: And if you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you're warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January?
Joe Biden: I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.
- ABC News interview with Joe Biden on July 5th, 2024

Like millions of Americans, I watched the presidential debate with horror. Five minutes in, one friend asked if we could stop watching because it was “too painful.” But the other viewers and I felt some patriotic/masochistic obligation to persevere. So on we went, Clockwork Orange’ing my friend into watching two deranged old men argue about whose golf handicap was better suited to lead the free world.

I didn’t know why, in the moment, we kept watching. Afterward, though, I realized I wanted to see the debate free from the inevitable following spin.

Sure enough, the spin started. In response to columnists at the NYT (including the editorial board), The New Yorker, the SF Chronicle, the LA Times, and Slow Boring telling Biden to step down as a result of his disastrous performance, the Biden camp circled the wagons. “There was a slow start, but it was a strong finish”, VP Kamala Harris claimed. “He got stronger over the debate,” California Governor Gavin Newsom echoed. He didn’t do badly, the Biden camp said, he just started shaky.

Eventually, this defense fell by the wayside. There’s only so much sugarcoating even the best political operators can layer on “We beat Medicare”, or on Biden’s baffling answer about abortion (the Dem’s strongest issue), in which he veered over to immigration (the Dem’s weakest issue) with an impossible-to-follow series of detours about rape and murder (generally not recommended for any party).

Realizing that there was no denying the poor performance, the Biden camp settled on: “It was just a bad night.”

While I agree that it was a bad night, I disagree that it was just a bad night.

A bad night is forgetting your phone in an Uber and getting in a fight with your partner. Biden lost a presidential debate on terms he set against a historically terrible presidential debater. In the process, Biden proved all his critics right about his greatest political vulnerability, a vulnerability he and his staff denied for months and years, one time by saying “Watch me!” That’s not just a bad night. That’s a humiliating, possibly election-losing own-goal.

Results of CNN flash polls asking, “Regardless of which candidate you support, who did the better job in the debate?” Trump lost every previous general election debate by double digits, only to beat Biden this debate by 34 points.

Hoping to do damage control, Biden took an interview with George Stephanopoulos.

The interview was not the debacle the debate was, but, for me, it was as saddening and frustrating. Because in it, Biden sounded remarkably like Trump.

When asked why he did so poorly, Biden blamed Trump yelling at him. But you can watch the debate right now and see Trump standing there silently, quizzically tilting his head while Biden digs his own holes. (Trump’s mic was also off.)

When asked about polls that show him down 6 points nationally, Biden says “I don’t buy that.”

When Stephanopoulos points out that he’s never seen a president with 36% approval get re-elected, Biden says, “Well, I don’t believe that’s my approval rating.”

When asked how he can turn his campaign around, Biden replies, “how many people draw crowds like I did today? Find me more enthusiastic than today? Huh?”

When asked about “discontent in the Democratic Party, House Democrats, Senate Democrats”, he says “I’ve seen it from the press.” In an interview with Joe Scarborough, Biden says only “the elites” are against him.

The denial of facts, using orchestrated crowds to prove his success, blaming the media and the elites: these are all classic Trump defenses.

Stephanopoulos even makes the comparison, asking, are you, like Trump, doing this for yourself, rather than for the country?

Biden says, “Oh, come on.” But at the end of the interview, Biden finishes with the quote at the top of this post:

I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.

This is about as close as a candidate can get to saying, “I’m running for me.”

On Reddit, one comment describes this quote as "a breaking point for a lot of folks.”

My personal breaking point against his candidacy was earlier, somewhere around “We beat Medicare.” But Biden saying this just about doing my best is a breaking point for my view of his self-centeredness.

Biden was never a great orator or strategist. No, his appeal was his fundamental decency, his ability to reach consensus. He was viewed as the moderate candidate in 2020, almost regardless of his political platform, because of his general disposition. He was someone who brought people in, whatever their party, heard their concerns, accommodated them. He was someone who listened.

Hearing him now, I think: what happened? He waves away polls showing 74% of Americans think he’s too old to be President. He dismisses everyone who says he should step down, including close friends like Thomas Friedman, as out-of-touch elites. Insiders say that if even Obama suggested he step down, it might further entrench Biden. Biden says only the “Lord Almighty” can convince him to leave.

He’s always been stubborn, and I suppose this is an extreme case of that tendency.

But as the rare millennial who voted for Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary, this is all so, so disheartening and infuriating. Biden was supposed to be the antidote to Trump, the one who would return us to civil, reality-based politics.

Instead, Biden has entered the same reality-distortion-field that Trump inhabits. Polls that show him down are not to be believed. Crowds assembled of Biden’s most devout supporters are the true gauge of popularity. Any member of the Democratic party who thinks he should step down, like Senator Mark Warner, is only doing so because “he tried to get the nomination too.” (Warner never ran for President.) No amount of bad polls, NYT editorials, and Democrats questioning his campaign can pierce the echo chamber Biden has built himself.

Worse, Biden has become blind to the power he wields. No serious candidate opposed him in the primary and no governor will tell him to step down now, not because they believe he’s the strongest candidate, but because doing so would scuttle their political futures. There is nothing, nothing, Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom would love more than for Biden to step down. Yet they spin for him on CNN, acting as though they would never think of running for president. Biden reads this as evidence that he is the strongest candidate. He believes what so many leaders trick themselves into believing: that his sycophants like him, not his power.

The most disheartening thing, though, is watching history repeat itself.

Every political commentator and their mom has compared Biden to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I will too, because I cannot get this RBG quote of my head:

So anybody who thinks that if I step down, Obama could appoint someone like me, they're misguided. As long as I can do the job full steam…. I think I'll recognize when the time comes that I can't any longer.

She couldn’t. No one can.

As I wrote before, these elderly leaders have no secret knowledge of their future. They don’t know when they’ll die; they don’t know when they will mentally decline. They don’t even know it — or they can’t face it — when it’s happening to them.

Yet we defer to them, as though they are impartial judges capable of pinpointing the precise moment when they can no longer serve, instead of flawed humans who desperately fear their own mortality and cling to the “psychic currency of their position”.1

Our country is held hostage by octogenarians, and it is outrageous. Faced with a likely election loss, the Democrats — once the obviously-more-sane party — now say, “Our leader only answers to God, what do you want us to do about it?”

For starters, please, please learn a lesson from RBG. Biden has no idea whether he can keep doing the job for 4 years. He has no idea if he can win in November. And if he bombs the next debate as badly as the first one, or spews nonsense in an interview, or just stays exactly where he is in the polls and loses, the Democratic party has fucked us. If this election is about the fate of democracy, like every fundraising text breathlessly tells me it is, don’t leave this decision to one old man’s ego.