Opinion Trump is too dangerous for Democrats to stick with Biden
President Biden’s performance in the presidential debate was genuinely pathetic, in the old sense of inspiring pity. Sometimes when he struggled to hold on to a thought, you wanted to look away from the screen.
But pity should not wholly take the place of anger. The Biden who debated Thursday night is manifestly not up to the job of president, and his inadequacy is more damning the more you believe what he had to say.
Biden is right, after all, to say that Donald Trump behaved disgracefully after the 2020 election. Either lying or delusional, Trump maintained that he had won the election in a landslide. He made wild allegations of fraud he could not back up. That lack of evidence did not stop him from trying to thwart the handover of power even though all the evidence said he had lost. Well into his successor’s presidency, Trump said he should be reinstated even if the Constitution stood in the way.
That such a man should not again have power is Biden’s most compelling argument for reelection. But that consideration should also have moved Biden to step aside long ago and give his party a chance to nominate a younger candidate — one more able to walk away from Biden’s record on inflation and the border.
It is true that the replacement candidate could have been Vice President Harris, who is roughly as unpopular as Biden and appears to inspire no more confidence from Democratic strategists. The unattractiveness of that alternative is Biden’s fault, too. He pledged to select a Black, female running mate, which meant choosing from a very small list of people who had won statewide office. Without that constraint, he could have chosen a more electable successor. The Democrats’ obsession with demographic representation weakened them.
Walking away from the 2024 race early, however, would have let the Democrats have a contest in which someone else could have emerged. Even Harris herself might be doing better than Biden. No reasonable person, of any partisan persuasion, would have blamed Biden for leaving. If he loses this November, on the other hand, many Democrats who have kept their doubts off-the-record will be saying that his decision to run this year was grossly irresponsible.
Democrats in and out of office have a lot of affection for Biden. Affection can make us ignore our misgivings about the older people in our lives for a long time. (Other emotions push us that way, too: self-interest, a desire to avoid unpleasant confrontations.) Sometimes, though, we see something that gives us resolve: It’s time to take away the keys. For Democrats, this debate ought to be that moment.