It’s been a week of “step away” stories for President Biden, the most significant of which came from the normally sympathetic David Ignatius of the Washington Post. His argument was clear and gently put: Mr. Biden is an admirable figure who’s won great victories, but age has taken too much from him. His supporters can see this, most privately admit it, and he should refrain from putting himself forward as his party’s nominee.
The tempo of such advice is increasing because time is running out for other candidates to gain purchase, raise money and organize campaigns. Some urgency comes because even though he’s under increased scrutiny as a teller of untruths, Mr. Biden unleashed a whopper this week, on 9/11, after the morning’s commemorations, when he claimed in a speech that he’d rushed to Ground Zero the day after the attack. He hadn’t, and the White House quietly admitted as much; he visited the site with a congressional delegation on Sept. 20, 2001.
Stories like this are so instantly checkable you wonder, again, why Mr. Biden would court embarrassment. After 22 years memory might scramble things, but CNN followed up with a report on other recent false claims, citing three in a single speech last month, one of them “long debunked.” It’s possible Mr. Biden has been telling these stories so long he’s become convinced they’re true. The disturbing consideration is that while repeated lying is a characterological fault, not knowing you’re lying might suggest a neurological one.
Last December I hoped the president’s advisers would take him aside and use some friendly persuasion. The age problem will only get worse, but it also offers a chance to cement his legacy. They could tell him, “You kept every promise you made to the party in 2020. You got rid of Donald Trump. You got us out of Afghanistan. You passed huge FDR-level bills that transformed the social safety net. . . . Boss, what a triumph! You did your job in history. You fulfilled your role.” He could go out an inspiration, announcing he wouldn’t throw his support behind any one candidate but would trust the party to decide.
I still think that’s the way to go. But only Joe Biden can remove Joe Biden. And there’s every sign he means to hang on—even past 82, and after more than 50 years operating at the highest levels of public life, and having achieved all the glittering prizes.
In insisting on running he is making a historical mistake. Second terms are disaster sites, always now. He isn’t up to it; it will cloud what his supporters believe is a fine legacy and allow the Kamala Harris problem to fester and grow. She is proof that profound and generational party dominance in a state tends to yield mediocrity. Politicians from one-party states never learn broadness. They speak only Party Language to Party Folk. They aren’t forced to develop policy mastery, only party dynamics. They rely on personal charm but are superficial. Going national requires developing more depth, or at least imitating depth. She didn’t bother to do that.
Obviously if the president took himself out of the 2024 race, chaos would follow. Democrats would immediately commence a hellacious fight, sudden and jagged. A dozen governors, senators and congressmen would enter the race. There would be no guarantee it wouldn’t produce a repeat of the 2020 Democratic primaries, when the party flag was planted so far to the left on such issues as illegal immigration that it thoroughly tripped up the eventual victor’s first term, and may account for his eventual loss.
There is no guarantee a man or woman thought to be essentially moderate, who would therefore be attractive to independents and centrists in the general election, would emerge, as Mr. Biden did in 2020. There is no guarantee the eventual nominee would be able to beat Mr. Trump. On the other hand, polls suggest it’s no longer assumed Mr. Biden would beat Mr. Trump.
But it would be a fight fought by a party newly alive, hungry and loaded for bear. It would be turning a page from the endless repetition we’re caught in. It would introduce an unknown factor for Mr. Trump, should he be the Republican nominee. And presumably it would unveil a candidate who could wage a vigorous and physical campaign. The closer the election gets, the less you can imagine Mr. Biden commanding a real re-election drive, one with enough energy and focus, while Mr. Trump, who looks physically worse than Mr. Biden, seems in his brain to be exactly what he was in 2016 and will continue with his mad vigor.
I close with the fact that whenever I think of Mr. Biden’s essential nature and character I think of “What It Takes,” Richard Ben Cramer’s great history of the 1988 presidential campaign, Mr. Biden’s first. This, as I have written, annoys me because I found Cramer a rather tricky and light-fingered fellow. He was also an indefatigable reporter with a gift of gab and a real voice who produced a classic of modern politics. Thirty years after publication, it presages a great deal of what we observe each day of Mr. Biden, and it is suggestive of the origins of the Hunter Biden problems and allegations.
For one thing, Joe Biden has always been obsessed by real estate and fancy houses, and money was always an issue. On a house he would buy a few years into his first Senate term: “The house is gorgeous, an old du Pont mansion in the du Pont neighborhood called Greenville, outside Wilmington. It’s the kind of place a thousand Italian guys died building—hand-carved doorways, a curbing hand-carved grand staircase that Clark Gable could have carried a girl down, a library fit for a Carnegie. . . . And a ballroom—can’t forget the ballroom.” He bid more than he had, “but Biden never let money stand in the way of a deal. He got in the developer’s face and started talking—fast.” He got the house—he always got the houses—and thereafter scrambled to cover its cost.
He wanted it all and had a sharp eye for how to get it. There is a beautiful speech Cramer presents as Mr. Biden’s. He was sitting around a back yard in Wilmington with friends when his sons were young, and Mr. Biden asked, “Where’s your kid going to college?”
His friend said, “Christ, Joe! He’s 8 years old!” Another implied it wasn’t important.
“Lemme tell you something,” Mr. Biden says, with a clenched jaw. “There’s a river of power that flows through this country. . . . Some people—most people—don’t even know the river is there. But it’s there. Some people know about the river, but they can’t get in . . . they only stand at the edge. And some people, a few, get to swim in the river. All the time. They get to swim their whole lives . . . in the river of power. And that river flows from the Ivy League.”
A lot of hungers, resentments and future actions were embedded in that speech by Joe Biden, Syracuse Law, class of ’68. They aren’t the words of an unsophisticated man but of a man who wanted things—houses, power, the glittering prizes—and who can’t always be talked out of them.