After calling for President Joe Biden to "leave the race" for the White House following his disastrous debate performance, The New York Times editorial board has again published a call for the commander-in-chief to "step aside" — and for his Democrat partners to help force him out of contention in November.
The critical assessment from the Times' editorial board — a body separate from the newsroom — asserts that Biden "seems to have lost track of his own role in this national drama" and "he has come to regard himself as indispensable. He does not seem to understand that he is now the problem — and that the best hope for Democrats to retain the White House is for him to step aside," the editorial states.
Reflecting on Biden's actions since his botched showdown with former President Donald Trump, the editorial board says "the intervening days have offered little comfort" for "voters who held out hope that President Biden’s failure to communicate during last month’s debate was an aberration."
The president, "instead of campaigning vigorously to disprove doubts and demonstrate that he can beat Mr. Trump, has maintained a scripted and controlled schedule of public appearances," the editorial critiques. "He has largely avoided taking questions from voters or journalists — the kinds of interactions that reveal his limitations and caused him so much trouble on the debate stage. And when he has cast aside his teleprompter, most notably during a 22-minute interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Friday, he has continued to appear as a man in decline."
Digging beyond the obvious issues with Biden's fitness and abilities to conversate without a script or specific notes, the Times' editorial board attacks the president's selfishness in his actions that show he has "discarded the concerns" of voters "and put the country at significant risk by continuing to insist that he is the best Democrat to defeat Mr. Trump." The ridiculously hyperbolic hand-wringing about a second Trump term aside, this hit against Biden's character is sure to sting the president and his family-turned-handlers.
For all Biden's talk about "democracy," the editorial emphasizes that Biden's refusal to step aside is an affront to the will of the American people. "The latest Times/Siena poll showed that 74 percent of voters think that Mr. Biden is too old to serve, an increase of five percentage points since the debate and not a figure that can be attributed to some kind of error or bias."
The Times' editorial even picks apart the letter Biden sent to congressional Democrats this week:
It’s not enough to blame the press, the donors, the pundits or the other elite groups for trying to push him out, as he did in the letter. In fact, to use his own words, “the voters — and the voters alone — decide the nominee of the Democratic Party.” But Democratic leaders shouldn’t rely solely on the judgment of the few voters who turned out in this year’s coronation primaries. They should listen instead to the much larger group of voters who have been telling every pollster in America their concerns for a long time. Mr. Biden has to pay attention to the will of the broader electorate that will determine the outcome in November.
The desperate call to action from the harried anti-Trump writers on the Times' editorial board betrays an absurd fear of another Trump administration. "Democrats who want to defeat Mr. Trump in November should speak plainly to Mr. Biden," the editorial demands. "They need to tell him that his defiance threatens to hand victory to Mr. Trump. They need to tell him that he is embarrassing himself and endangering his legacy. He needs to hear, plain and clear, that he is no longer an effective spokesman for his own priorities."
In the editorial board's view, "a whisper campaign is inadequate to this moment, because the moment is urgent." The fearful screed warns that the "longer Mr. Biden continues his grasp on the nomination, the harder it will be to replace him, as he certainly knows."
"...it is increasingly clear that the president is unwilling to accept the reality of his situation," the second anti-Biden-2024 editorial from the Times' editorial board laments. "He is engaging in a staring contest with Democratic leaders, and he appears to be winning."
Indeed, it seems as though many Democrats — perhaps most notably even members of the House's progressive "Squad" — are circling their wagons around the president, in public at least.
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