How former president Biden cost Democrats the presidency

Carl P. Leubsdorf, Tribune News Service

If the goal of Joe Biden’s “Politburo” was to hide reality and convince Americans the former president was fit for another term, it may have been the least successful cover-up since Richard Nixon sought to avoid complicity in the Watergate scandal. That’s because even before Biden gave history’s worst presidential debate performance — and longer before the recent Jake Tapper-Alex Thompson disclosures of how truly bad things had gotten in the White House — polls showed an overwhelming majority of Americans had already reached the conclusion he should step down.

Indeed, members of Biden’s palace guard were not the worst villains in this whole unhappy episode, which resulted in the 2024 Democratic loss to Donald Trump. After all, they only did what White House palace guards always do: protect their principal and portray him in the best light. It was the other top Democrats who saw enough and probably knew enough about Biden’s age and his mental state to know their party needed a different standard-bearer if it was to prevent the return of Trump — but they lacked the political courage to do anything.

After all, it didn’t take a political genius to understand that, at the very least, the Democrats had undertaken a giant riverboat gamble in sticking with a president who showed increasing signs of physical and mental frailty and would be 86 at the end of a second term.

A few said so publicly, like former Obama White House adviser David Axelrod, and Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, who launched a quixotic primary campaign against Biden. According to Tapper and Thompson, others raised doubts behind the scenes. “Are we sure this is a good idea?” senior adviser Anita Dunn reportedly asked some colleagues. And Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Biden directly, “I’m with you one hundred and ten percent, whatever you want to do. But I want to make sure you want to take this on.” The authors say he suggested on two separate occasions that the real issue was not how Biden felt now but, “how would he feel in four, five, six years from now?”

They write that former White House chief of staff Bill Daley “felt strongly (in 2023) that the notion that Biden would be up to the task the following year was unsustainable” and reached out to some potential contenders — Governors Gavin Newsom of California, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, J. B. Pritzker of Illinois. But all demurred, reportedly fearing that, if they challenged Biden and he lost, “they would be blamed.” (In fact, those who vouched for Biden’s well-being may suffer; already, former Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra’s silence has been questioned by a California gubernatorial primary rival.) On the other hand, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama all won the presidency by taking on an initially resistant Democratic establishment.

Nothing came of any of that. And one of the more startling disclosures is that Biden and his wife Jill apparently made his decision to run again without any effort to weigh the pros and cons or seek the views of his advisers. I’ve always felt that, had the Democrats suffered a traditional 2022 midterm setback instead of faring reasonably well, public pressure to replace Biden would have emerged before the last votes were counted.

The irony is that he had almost nothing to do with the Democrats holding those losses to a minimum, though they did lose their House majority. That’s because he was already sufficiently unpopular, thanks to factors like lingering inflation and the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan, that most embattled Democrats resisted presidential appearances in their states or districts.

That meant that the party failed to suffer the midterm rout many pre-election accounts predicted — despite Biden, not because of him. Still, the outcome deterred potential challengers from undertaking the massive and fraught task of taking on the party’s incumbent in the crucial post-election period where they would have needed to start raising money and establishing campaigns in the early primary states. While a challenge might have caused an internal party bloodbath, it might also have precipitated Biden’s withdrawal, given the diminished capacities he was showing behind the scenes and — when aides couldn’t constrain them — in public. The authors provide additional details for the post-debate pressure that ultimately forced him to withdraw 23 days after the June 27 debate. Among their sources, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer seems to have been most open in recounting the conversation with Biden that finally convinced him he was headed for disastrous defeat.

The book accepts the widespread belief that, despite initial enthusiasm for Vice President Kamala Harris’ successor candidacy, she was doomed. But they only touch lightly on how the administration’s policy failures on inflation and immigration enabled her flawed rival to sway enough “swing” voters to prevail.