In this space last November, an editorial headlined “For the sake of the nation, Mr. President, please bow out” spawned a flurry of angry comments and letters from supporters of President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.
The threat of a second term for ex-President Donald Trump, those critics said, was so dangerous to the future of democracy that all who recognize that danger must unite behind Biden.
The position of the Editorial Board back then — and we certainly weren’t alone — was that the unique danger posed by Trump was the very reason Democrats should find a younger, more electable candidate before the primary schedule made such a switch an even messier prospect.
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Now here we sit, eight months later, perched upon the precipice that we and so many others have long warned was ahead: The 81-year-old Biden’s catastrophic (the only word for it) performance against Trump in Thursday’s presidential debate makes the continuation of his campaign untenable.
Trump’s characteristic flood of lies at the debate and his refusal to commit to accepting this fall’s election results drove home the urgency of fielding a credible opponent to stop him from regaining power. The current president is not that credible opponent today. That should finally be clear to anyone not ensconced in the bubble of self-delusion surrounding Biden’s inner circle.
Clearer heads in the party must burst that bubble and demand a new ticket.
The legitimate case for Biden to step aside has never been about his first-term record as president. By most measures, it has been a success: continuing low unemployment, a steady hand internationally and important advancements in climate and clean-energy initiatives.
Yes, Biden’s big-spending economic policies arguably contributed to higher inflation. But they also eased the path to post-pandemic recovery for millions of Americans while avoiding a recession. And the value of Biden’s reassertion of political norms and basic decency after a Trump term bereft of both has had incalculable value.
None of which mitigates the plainly visible decline in Biden’s vitality and ability to communicate that the whole world has watched unfold for at least the past year. It was that visible decline that seemingly came to a head on the Atlanta debate stage last week.
Not being medical professionals, we’re not qualified to say whether Biden’s many fumbles — the halting and often inaudible speech, the squinting appearance of frozen confusion, the meandering dead-end sentences — were evidence of cognitive decline or just looked like it.
But the point is, they looked like it. Fairly or not, Biden’s age-related stumbles have long been cited by detractors as disqualifying. The debate played, devastatingly, to that theme.
It’s bad enough that a shameless GOP has resorted to deceptive camera angles and other cheap stunts to erode the public’s confidence in Biden’s cognitive health. But nothing they’ve done is as damaging as what Biden himself did (and failed to do) on Thursday.
Trump presented opportunity after missed opportunity for Biden to highlight his challenger’s unfitness for office. Trump’s many lies during the debate (more than 30 of them in 90 minutes, according to CNN) included familiar whoppers like state laws that allow newborns to be killed after birth, police escorting Jan. 6 rioters into the Capitol and, of course, his core Big Lie of a stolen 2020 election.
Yet Biden was unable to effectively counter any of it. At the same time, Trump — at 78, only marginally younger than Biden — darkly demonstrated the biological fact that people age at different rates.
“We finally beat Medicare,” Biden declared, nonsensically, at the end of a confused riff regarding health care.
“He’s right, he did beat Medicaid, beat it to death,” Trump retorted, getting the name of the program wrong and offering a reverse-reality of the two parties’ priorities regarding health care — but still managing to come off as the coherent one.
Unsurprisingly, a post-debate CBS poll found that almost three-quarters of registered voters say Biden does not have the cognitive health to serve as president. A Morning Consult poll found almost half of Democrats want a new nominee.
With that predictable fallout, many in the party expected Biden to put the good of the nation first and start the hard, selfless work of cobbling together a new ticket that can win.
Such optimists were quickly disappointed. Biden spent the weekend insisting he will press ahead — thus elevating his own interests above those of the nation with a self-centered recklessness that is nothing less than, well, Trumpian.
Of the many desperate arguments Biden’s inner circle is making, the most nonsensical is that it’s too late in the election cycle to release his delegates and let the Democratic National Convention choose a nominee in August. Chaos will ensue, they warn.
It could indeed be chaotic, but that’s the way nominees were chosen throughout America’s political history prior to the 1970s. The party has plenty of vibrant talent, especially among its governors. Given Trump’s stubbornly low ceiling of support, any serious Democrat would have a strong chance of beating him.
Last week’s senior moment was Biden’s worst, but it was not his first. Does anyone really believe it will be his last in the campaign? Will choosing a new nominee be a less chaotic prospect if the party is forced into it by medical circumstances right before the convention? Or even after the convention?
The ravages of age don’t ease with the passage of time. What the nation saw on Thursday it will see again if Biden continues this campaign.
Donors, office-holders and other prominent Democrats can force the issue by publicly breaking with Biden if he doesn’t agree to back the nomination of a new standard-bearer.
Or they can hold their breath at every Biden public appearance from now until November, hoping it’s not the one that ushers in the return of an ex-president who endangers democracy.
Recent polls have shown a growing number of US voters, including many Democrats, expressing doubts about President Joe Biden's candidacy.
Editorial: Wide swaths of Americans, of all political shapes, view Biden — who turns 81 later this month — as being simply too old to seek a second term.