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President Biden’s announcement that he will not seek a second term — and his endorsement of Kamala Harris — came after weeks of increasing pressure from Democratic Party insiders, alarmed that voters had finally discovered what they had known for months. Joe Biden is a shell of the man he once was. Voters knew it — and they wouldn’t vote for him. Voters also knew they had been lied to by the White House, Biden’s political allies and the mainstream media, not once or twice but for years. Whatever credibility those sources still had is gone and, with it, a major prop in the Democratic coalition. The cumulative result was almost certain to cost Democrats not only the White House but the House and Senate, as well. Biden dropping out is unlikely to help.
Biden’s inglorious exit evoked the fate of that great cartoon character, Wile E. Coyote. His futile pursuit of the Road Runner usually ended with Wile E. running off a cliff but remaining suspended in mid-air until he looked down. When he finally looked, he began plummeting to the canyon floor, far below.
That was Joe Biden’s ultimate fate. He was as slow to grasp it as Wile E. Coyote. He ran off the cliff after his catastrophic debate performance against Donald Trump. For weeks he refused to look down. He wouldn’t look when his wife helped him walk down a few stairs after the debate. He wouldn’t look when President Obama had to guide him off the stage at George Clooney’s star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles. He wouldn’t look when major donors reported their shock at his frail appearance and began closing their checkbooks. He wouldn’t look as he stumbled through recent interviews. He wouldn’t look as more elected officials began calling for him to end the race for reelection. The canyon was too far below. It was far better to try and stay suspended in mid-air.
He had a little help, at least for a while. The major media was slow to abandon the candidate they had backed for so long. The day after the Clooney fundraiser, the Washington Post ran a rainbows-and-unicorns article about fine it all was. Nothing to see here; please move along. A month later, the same paper reported on the same event, saying, in effect, their earlier article was a cover-up and that Biden was in bad shape. Of course, they never admitted their own shameful role in misleading their readers.
After the debate fiasco, the only way for Biden to get back on solid ground was to give extemporaneous interviews and avoid major mistakes. If he were successfully, he would prove he could still do the job. He wasn’t.
Those interviews did not go well. He waited too long after the debate to begin them and then his performance did little to assuage voters’ concerns. He made grotesque errors (for instance, saying he was the first black vice president), and his team was caught handing softball questions to some radio stations. The best one could say about these interviews was “some weren’t so bad.” But “not terrible” is hardly a ringing endorsement.
Biden gave himself much higher grades and kept saying (to paraphrase), “I’m staying in this race, and I’m not changing my mind. My health is fine, the polls show a close race, and I’ve always been ‘the comeback kid.’ ”
Biden may have truly believed that, but party bigwigs did not. Not any longer. Their sober reassessment posed a terrible dilemma for them and for their party because Biden alone controlled the decision whether to stay or go. He had won all the Democratic primaries because he was the incumbent and insiders had been too timid to endorse a serious challenger when it really mattered. The result was that Biden had more than enough convention delegates to win the nomination. He controlled the decision whether to stay in the race.
He clearly wanted to stay and said it time and time again, publicly and privately.
Since Biden held all the cards, what pushed him out? A succession of grim, private conversations with the party’s leaders from the House and Senate and major Democratic fundraisers, followed by a rising crescendo of public calls for him to exit. Those calls carried weight because many came from erstwhile supporters and because they told him the money to campaign had dried up.
Democrats had read the sinking poll numbers with a cold eye and listened to their beleaguered members, who feared Biden’s name at the top of the ticket would cost them their jobs. All of them concluded the presidential race was hopeless, even before former President Trump emerged triumphant from an assassination attempt. The insiders’ verdict, echoed by their major donors and the media, was that Biden would cost Democrats the House and Senate. Staying in, they told him privately, would seal his historic image as the architect of disaster.
This message from elected leaders was reinforced by his most loyal fundraisers, who told him the money had dried up. Some was going to down-ballot races to avert disaster there. Some had dried up for those candidates, too. Every Democratic running in a purple district was petrified, and they were saying so to party leaders. It was those vulnerable candidate who led the public calls for Biden to withdraw. Loyalty mattered far less that electability.
The same message was echoed in critical reports from the legacy media, long an integral part of the Democratic coalition. They had covered up for him for years. For the last two, at least, they had failed to meet their fundamental duty to tell the public about Biden’s cognitive and physical decline. Why did they fail? Because their partisan commitment to Democratic victory overrode their journalistic responsibility to tell the truth. Now, they had been caught.
They couldn’t continue the cover-up after the debate. The voting public could finally see Biden’s decline for themselves. They could also see that the mainstream media had been lying to them.
Now that the mainstream media had been caught lying, they quickly transformed from lap dogs to attack dogs. They weren’t just trying to salvage their reputations. They were also trying to do what other Democratic insiders were: get Biden out of the race.
Put another way, the mainstream media is part of the Democratic Party machine. That was true when they were covering for Biden, and it was equally true after the turned on him. Their positions follow those of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. They shouldn’t get credit for trudging along like lemmings.
Once the media turned, the White House briefing room became a war zone. Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, deserved combat pay for conducting those briefings. The once-suppliant media no longer parroted her basic message, “all is well.” How could they after the public had seen what Biden’s condition really was? KJP’s denials began to sound like those of Baghdad Bob, saying Saddam’s regime was winning.
The final blows came in a public-private combo attack by Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi. Schiff, who is running for Senate in deep-blue California, privately told donors Biden should get out. He knew that message would leak, and it did. Schiff then followed up by saying the same thing publicly. Informed observers knew he would never do that without backing from the most important Democrat in California, former speaker Nancy Pelosi. That connection and Schiff’s public statement sent a powerful message to President Biden. So did reports that Pelosi had been working the phones trying to remove the president.
Pelosi followed up by saying the same thing privately to Biden. Her message: there’s no way you can win, and you will cost us the House and Senate. You will damage your own legacy.
The clearest signal that these calls were having an impact came when the Democratic Party refused to hold an early, virtual meeting to hand Biden the nomination before the Chicago convention.
That refusal was stunning. A sitting president should be able to control his own party’s convention. When he could not, the message was blunt. “You don’t control the party any longer. True, you can decide to stay in the race, but you won’t have the party behind you. You won’t get any more money. No embattled candidates will stand beside you in public. You’re on your own.” Biden could see that for himself when he held a (small) rally in Michigan, a crucial battleground state. He stood there alone. All the state’s top elected officials were apparently too busy having their hair washed. None was willing to stand near Biden in public. Another message sent.
That Biden received this grim news was clear when he finally opened the door publicly to leaving the race. He made that concession when he said he would leave the race if his doctor told him “I had some medical condition that emerged.” That was not a high bar to clear. He already had those medical conditions.
With that concession, Joe Biden walked slowly, gingerly, stiffly off the same cliff as Wile E. Coyote. Worse, his erstwhile political allies kept yelling “Please look down. Look down. Look down.”
When he finally did, he began plummeting toward the inevitable splat. His fall proves the deep truth of Enoch Powell’s observation that “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”
That is how Joe Biden’s political life ends. In failure.
The scope of that failure is not confined to Joe Biden. It envelopes his party for three reasons:
- They made the switch so late
- The obvious successor, Kamala Harris, is unpopular, inarticulate and incompetent, but it is nearly impossible to by-pass her without destroying the Democratic coalition. And
- The party’s problems were never limited to Joe Biden’s poor health. His policies were unpopular and unsuccessful
Those policies were not Joe Biden’s alone. They are the heart of the modern Democratic Party and will stick to any candidate for president. If that candidate is Harris, they are inscribed on her in permanent marker.
Down-ballot candidates with be harmed, too. They will face a hard, uphill climb to victory if the top-of-the-ticket does poorly, as seems likely, and they are marked by the administration’s failing policies. The whole party backed an open border. The whole party loved the huge spending programs that flooded the country with federal money after the Covid crisis had passed, fueling inflation. They whole party backed the Green Agenda, which led to skyrocketing fuel prices.
Now, those failed policies are the anvil attached to all Democratic candidates as they follow Joe Biden and Wile E. Coyote off the cliff. All of them have looked down. They see the canyon floor far, far below, and they know a huge splat is coming.
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