(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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The Paralysis of the Democratic Party [1]
['Condé Nast', 'Isaac Chotiner']
Date: 2024-07-17 23:45:54.757000+00:00
Donald Trump has been a curse on the United States, but in at least one sense he has been a gift to Democrats. Since his victory in 2016, the animating idea of the Democratic Party has been to prevent Trump from retaining or regaining power. This is the message the Party has conveyed to its voters, one that sparked its midterm success in 2018; Joe Biden’s victory in both the Democratic primary and the general election in 2020; and even the Democrats’ surprisingly good performance in the 2022 midterms, when Trump acolytes running in critical Senate races in several swing states were defeated. Trump was a desirable opponent: highly unpopular and possessing of a grotesque character and thuggishness that united the Democratic Party’s sometimes warring factions. Stopping him appeared to be both a political boon and a moral imperative.
A few weeks ago, however, this pact between the Party and its voters—support at the ballot box in exchange for full-fledged opposition to Trump—broke down. Democrats are now facing their most significant political crisis in recent history. The long drama of the past several weeks, in which the Party has flirted with calling for Biden to step down as its presumptive 2024 Presidential nominee, may have culminated with Saturday’s assassination attempt on Trump. The Party’s leadership; its federal and state officeholders; and its former elected officials, such as Barack Obama, were finally given a perfect excuse to do nothing about Biden’s flagging candidacy.
On Sunday, reports began to emerge that the shooting would pause any attempts to unseat Biden. “I’ve been speaking with some top Democrats,” the reporter Robert Costa explained, on CBS News. “They believe that those Democrats who have the concerns about President Biden are now standing down politically, will back President Biden because of this fragile political moment. . . . It’s time for the country to stick together, and that means Democrats sticking together as well.” A Democratic member of the House anonymously told Axios that it would be “bad form” to focus on the nomination right now. There was no guarantee, even before Saturday night, that Democrats would find the courage to sufficiently pressure Biden into yielding. (On Wednesday, amid chatter of a renewed push against Biden, Adam Schiff told the Los Angeles Times that Biden should drop out.) But the Party’s willingness to allow an act of political violence to abet the path to the Presidency of a man who specializes in fomenting political violence is almost too bleakly ironic to fathom.
The problems with Biden’s candidacy aren’t new. His approval ratings have been below forty-five per cent for roughly three years (he is currently at around thirty-eight per cent), and for the entirety of 2024 he has trailed Donald Trump in head-to-head polls in the swing states needed to get two hundred and seventy electoral votes. A majority of Americans consistently say that Biden is too old to be President. Through the spring, he had been running what can only be called an anemic campaign: light on public appearances and interviews, devoid of solo press conferences, and with an utter inability to focus a sustained line of attack on his opponent. And then, on June 27th, Biden had what was arguably the most disastrous Presidential debate in American history, appearing feeble and confused and unable to formulate basic answers to simple questions.
Almost immediately after the debate, speculation began about whether Biden should remain the presumptive Democratic nominee. Reporters started asking questions about his health and stamina. News articles about his general inability to handle the rigors of the Presidency began to appear. Even Biden himself reportedly conceded to a meeting of Democratic governors that his staff needed to stop scheduling events after 8 P.M. (he later denied this); Axios reported that he is “dependably engaged” between the hours of 10 A.M. and 4 P.M. In those early post-debate days, the Party’s leaders appeared to have two choices. The first was to call for Biden to step aside; he was already polling worse than his (unpopular) Vice-President, Kamala Harris, and numerous other Democrats, none of whom has anywhere near his name recognition or the war chest of a national campaign to pump out ads celebrating their accomplishments.
The second path was to hope that the debate was a one-off meltdown—an unlikely scenario given that Biden has clearly aged significantly in recent months, according to aides and members of Congress, and anyone with a television—and to support Biden on the condition that he prove that he could run a more vigorous campaign and assuage his doubters. Perhaps he could do a series of interviews and rallies in the days following the debate. (It seems like ages ago now that the White House attributed his poor performance, in part, to a cold.) The problem was—and is—that even before the debate a majority of Americans already doubted his abilities. Age, as a candidate liability, is not really akin to a character flaw or an unpopular position that can be managed through persuasion or flip-flopping—it’s only going to get worse. The gall of asking the electorate to give another four years to someone of Biden’s age and physical condition is rivalled only by the disgrace of asking them to give Trump another term; the danger of the latter is why the alternative should be straightforward and safe, not shuffling and wheezing.
Still, pressuring the sitting President is a difficult and potentially dangerous thing to do for most politicians, and it’s at least comprehensible why the second option appeared more palatable to members of Congress, who are professionally cautious. But then something strange happened. Biden didn’t begin running an energetic campaign. For almost a week, he barely appeared in public. He then gave a painful, though not calamitous, interview to George Stephanopoulos; he held a few campaign events; and he called in to “Morning Joe,” where, despite the fact that he wasn’t on video, and could therefore have easily read from prepared talking points, he gave several answers that were simply nonsensical. (“The fact of the matter is, how can you assure you’re going to be on—on, you know—on your way to go to, you know, work tomorrow? Age—age wasn’t, you know, the idea that I’m too old.”)
By last week, when Biden appeared at a NATO summit and conducted an extended press conference for the first time all year, expectations were so low that his gaffes—referring to the Ukrainian President as Vladimir Putin and to his own Vice-President as Donald Trump—were wished away by many commentators, who instead focussed on his occasionally coherent, though rambling, remarks. (If you are inclined to believe Rachel Maddow, who said that Biden’s performance showed him to be a “master of the foreign-policy field,” I encourage you to read the White House’s transcript of the event and try to follow the train of thought in almost any of Biden’s answers.) In short, the best that Democrats could hope for was a diminished candidate doing better than he had done at the debate, and about as well as he had done all year—during which time he had still been losing to Trump, who, in 2016, never once ran ahead of Hillary Clinton in national polling averages.
One can argue, and not without merit, that polls are fickle and error-prone, and that it’s still possible Biden will beat Trump in November. At the NATO press conference, Biden made the strange claim that other Presidents running for reëlection had also lagged behind their opponents at this point in the race, implying that his dismal standing did not make the outcome a foregone conclusion. But the incumbents he was referring to—including, presumably, Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush—went on to lose reëlection, which somewhat blunted the force of Biden’s point. The particular headwinds that Biden faces—near-total name recognition (which makes changing opinions more difficult), an inability to aggressively attack Trump, the fact that very little has shaken up the race in any meaningful sense all year—suggest that the Democrats must do something.
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