Biden Should Step Aside—and Democrats Should Act Like Adults

Only little babies can't admit when they're in trouble.

The first presidential debate was a failure on many levels. It failed as television because these new rules really gave the whole thing a public access “I’m Wayne, this is Garth” vibe. The lack of a studio audience made it uncomfortable. There was nothing to distract you from the fact that the men on stage are 900-year-old mummies.

Trump performed as expected: He was quick on his feet, delivered a few good lines, and lied a million times.

If the game plan for the Democrats going into this was to let Trump remind Americans how much they don’t like him, Trump played his role. He wasn’t barking mad like in the debate in 2020, but he was his irrepressible self. That game plan—let Trump be Trump and basically get out of the way—didn’t work out though, did it? Because Biden didn’t get out of the way.

Biden was awful. Terrible. Horrible.

His discomforting performance completely overshadowed everything else.

I’ve honestly never seen anything like that. It was sad. I like Joe Biden on.a personal level. He seems like a decent guy who cares a lot. And that made it, well, sad.

But that will be the end of my sympathy for Biden in this post, because this really isn’t about Biden. He’s a politician; the leader of his party, and the president of the United States. His personal virtues necessarily have to be sublimated to those greater causes.

Or to put it another way, it’s show business, not show friends.

It’s time to step aside and take that Amtrak train back to Delaware.

This was just not cricket.

It was unacceptable.

Watching MSNBC after the debate last night was just surreal. It was people in real time processing a lot of emotions. They didn’t delusionally sugarcoat it, which is to their credit, but it was a disquieting window into people trying desperately to give their partisan audience some glimmer of hope.

At one point, Lawrence O’Donnell started talking about how, yeah, Biden is old, but FDR couldn’t even walk.

Over on CNN, Anderson Cooper was getting into it with Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, both of whom were good soldiers and tried to spin for their boss, but they had losing cards.

People on the internet mostly had no problem acknowledging this utter disaster, but some delusional dead-enders immediately pivoted to blaming the media for it. Why didn’t Trump get fact-checked? Why are people being so anti-Biden in these post-game wrap-ups? Snap polls are always wrong! Etc…

There was also the democrats who sort of work for campaigns and were pushing talking points. The big one was: Joe Biden won on substance! The dumb media wants this to be about style, but Biden is a substance man!

I honestly don’t even know if he won on substance because I had a hard time parsing most of his answers.

The other main talking point was: Biden has been a wonderful president for 3.5 years. So he had one bad night! Everyone has a bad night every once in a while! You think Marlon Brando never had a bad night when he was doing Streetcar?  Obama lost the first debate to Romney, remember? But he won, didn’t he? And let us not forget that Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act and did the Infrastructure Bill, etc…

You get the gist.

Let’s just pretend for the sake of argument that all of these contentions are true, ok? I don’t personally think they are 100% true but let’s just say they are.

It was one bad night. He is a globe-straddling giant of a president who has accomplished more than any two mortals who have ever held the office combined..

So what?

I mean, obviously, it matters in an objective sense about universal truth or whatever, but it has nothing to do with the cost of tea in China, you dig?

Biden could have built the Statue of Liberty and landed on the Moon in the first two 3.5 years of his presidency, but if he was still the most unpopular president of the modern era in terms of favorabilities, then, well, electorally, what good were they? It’s not necessarily fair, and you can point fingers at messaging choices and a million different things, but that’s the lay of the land. LBJ had the Great Society and was unpopular. Doing things guarantees you nothing.

The race has been incredibly stable for a year, with Biden losing by a little bit. Sort of a toss-up in the popular vote, but behind in the electoral college. The polls haven’t much budged even when Trump was convicted.

I wrote a few times that I was waiting for the debate because it would be the beginning of the actual campaign season when people really started to accept the reality that it was Trump vs. Biden. Not only did Biden not gain—which he needs to do—but he bombed! Historically!

There is no reason to believe that this race is going to fundamentally change between now and at least the next debate in the fall. Convention bounces normally sort of cancel each other out, and they’ve been getting smaller anyway for years. I find it sort of hard to believe that anything will happen at either of them to change anything fundamentally. Which means he’s going into the homestretch of the campaign significantly down. How down? I don’t know. Nate’s model before the debate had Trump in the mid-60 % range and Biden at about 1/3. 1/3 isn’t zero. He could still win! Trump won in 2016 with odds like that.

But they’re not great odds!

The difference between 2012 and this is…a universe!

For one thing, Obama lost to Romney because he was sort of a prick that day. He came off like a grouchy, pretentious jerk. But he didn’t come off like a lunatic. And there was another debate soon after, so he had a chance to immediately rectify it. That isn’t true here. There is three months before the next one. This disastrous performance confirmed all these fears about him being too old and too out of it, and now that will be that for 3 months.

Having watched last night, I’m honestly not sure that he will do better in that debate. Or at the convention. Or at random rallies in Wisconsin.

There’s no longer any obvious structural reason to think Biden is going to overtake Trump. His campaign staff is utterly incompetent and doesn’t seem to have any good ideas about changing the narrative. (All of those people should be fired.) And, like, look, he’s losing. So he can’t just keep on with this trajectory.

Everyone is saying he should step aside, and everyone knows he probably won’t. The party can’t force him to. Even if they could, it would be hugely disastrous to do so. He has to decide to step aside, presumably with prompting from his family and Democratic allies like Obama and Pelosi. I can’t say I think he will because that’s just not how brains are really designed to work. People have doubted him before, and he’s defied expectations, so he’ll tell himself that he’ll do it again.

But if he did step aside, what would happen?

The overwhelming likelihood is that Kamala Harris will get the nomination, possibly unopposed. But, it’s also possible, if Biden didn’t endorse, that other people might throw their hats in the ring, and we’d have that contested convention everyone has been dreaming about for 50 years. But, in all likelihood, it’s Kamala.

For 3.5 years, people have talked about the Kamala problem, because she polls even worse than Biden. But I think that number is soft.

Her numbers would go up the second this actually was real.

The GOP and Trump (and the Left) have spent a year loading Biden with all this baggage. They hate Kamala too; in fact, they probably hate her more, but they don’t matter. Like, it doesn’t matter if Republicans and communists hate her. They’re already going to vote against the Dems. She needs swing voters who I don’t think do hate her like that.

Ironically, the talking point that was being pushed so much last night to calm everyone’s nerves—Trump also did badly, but it was just overshadowed—lends credence to the idea that Biden should step aside, even if it is Kamala who replaces him.

Trump is still Trump. He still puts his foot in his mouth and espouses lots of unpopular things. Any Democrat who doesn’t have the massive stigma that is now irrevocably attached to Biden has a better chance than he does.

Democrats can’t win this election if it’s about them. They can’t. (I mean, in a literal sense, they technically can because anything is possible, but they probably won’t.) They don’t have the cards. It needs to be about Trump and abortion.

Biden is now the story, so he can’t fully execute that strategy. But people do have fondness for him personally, and that will play well if he steps aside. “With a heavy heart blah blah blah” and he could sell it as he didn’t want it to be true that he was too old, and he doesn’t think he is in terms of actually being president, but the rigors of campaigning etc etc have revealed that it’s time to pass the baton to the next generation etc etc…

It’s a noble thing to leave before you have to. It’s hard. It’s the act of an adult.

Trump lost, tried to steal the election,  and still wouldn’t leave.

I’m not saying that I think Kamala would be a prohibitive favorite. Democrats are in the rough. But I really do think she has a better chance than he does.

If your car is aimed at a cliff and you are careening towards it, it doesn’t make you brave or virtuous to keep going straight. It makes you stubborn and stupid and ignorant and soon enough you’ll probably also be airborn.

Maybe don’t drive off the cliff, Thelma.

One last thought…