Desperate Times, Desperate Measures, And The Biden Question

How to think about uncertainty when contemplating drastic action.

(Photo by William Thomas Cain/Getty Images)

Sixteen years ago John McCain was on track to lose the 2008 presidential election to Barack Obama, and his senior advisers concluded he would lose unless something drastic happened. 

By summer of an election year, though, it’s terribly hard to manufacture race-altering developments. 

• McCain was on the older side, but he was physically healthy, and had just won a rough, competitive primary—there was no way to swap him out for a younger, more dynamic candidate, and in any case the Republican bench was running thin. 

• The presidential debates, which didn’t take place until autumn, were still many weeks away and experience showed that formal debates essentially never alter the underlying dynamics of a race. How many candidates for office have lost their elections because of one rotten debate performance? How many have won on the strength of a stellar debate performance alone?

• McCain’s opponent, Obama, had been through a brutal primary of his own, had weathered a series of politically fraught moments, and was nevertheless an object of admiration well outside his core base of support. Gutter politics were not going to be of much help. 

Like every losing campaign, the McCain people knew there was an outside chance something exogenous and earth-shattering might unsettle things. (As it happens, when global financial markets collapsed a couple months later, McCain took the bizarre step of “suspending” his campaign to make a big show of flying back to Washington like an unsummoned superhero.) 

But if a campaign requires an act of god to win, it becomes little more than a placeholder. Its candidate and campaign staff and volunteers are left to hope something bad happens, which creates perverse incentives in and of itself. 

So in late August, McCain did something drastic. Erratic even. He passed over every credible running mate on his short list, including outside-the-box contenders like Joe Lieberman, in favor of Alaska’s then-governor Sarah Palin. 

And for whatever it’s worth, for a few days at least, the plan sort of worked. Palin was novel and commanded attention; the press corps breathed new life into the funerary Republican convention; and McCain briefly pulled ahead of Obama in tracking polls. 

But when media fascination gave way to scrutiny, the public quickly learned that Palin was unfit to lead the country in the event of McCain’s death, and that she was a charlatan to boot. Polls reverted to their pre-Palin status quo, until the fall campaign, when Obama opened up a huge lead, and never looked back. McCain probably lost the election by more than he would have if he’d selected a normal, experienced politician as his running mate. 

That was a real miscalculation.

It doesn’t follow, though, that the people who convinced McCain to nominate Palin cost him the presidency. Under a more conventional playbook, McCain was also toast, and so they were desperate. In their desperation, they made a politically unwise and civically disastrous decision. But their determination to find some way to shake up the race was well-founded.

PULL BACK THE CERTAIN

I dredge up all this not-so-ancient history because Democrats are in a similar bind today—no good options to choose from—and we’re called upon to be mindful of the risk of miscalculating. 

The downside risk of nominating someone other than Joe Biden is especially useful to Biden’s allies, because fear of the unknown is the status quo’s partner in crime. How can the people advocating for a candidate swap be so certain?

We of course can’t be certain and shouldn’t pretend to be. But inaction in the face of uncertainty is not wise by definition. The question can and should be turned inward: Why are Bidenistas so certain the losing path they’re on is the optimal one? 

The McCain-Palin history is valuable today as a guide through uncertainty when the status quo looks hopeless: First, only take extraordinary risks if you’re really on course to lose, as McCain was. Then, if you conclude you must, act within the bounds of civic obligation. Don’t place your own interests above the country’s. Don’t place crooks, frauds, or incompetents one dying breath away from apocalyptic power. 

Under today’s circumstances, despite plenty of uncertainty, that sums to a strong case for a new Democratic ticket. 

DEBATE AND SWITCH

Let’s stipulate for argument’s sake that Biden is healthy enough to be president, even as he’s lost the ability to mount a normal campaign. (On this point, it’s Biden’s supporters, more than his skeptics, who are cavalier about the unknown.)

How certain are we that he’s on track to lose? Perhaps a bit less certain than the McCain team was, but still quite certain. 

The bullish case for Biden when he was running behind Trump in the winter was that he’d surpass Trump in the spring and put the election out of reach this summer. By the time of the debate though, Biden was generously tied with Trump—perhaps a point ahead in national popular vote polls, but a couple behind in the determinative race for electors. He challenged Trump to the debate in order to vindicate his optimistic supporters, and if he’d won, he’d likely have a real-though-narrow lead right now.

But he lost. And he lost in a way that revealed he’s become unable to reliably communicate clearly in unscripted settings. That’s an essential skill for a candidate, not a trivial one. And his diminishment has confronted his campaign with an impossible dilemma: withdraw Biden from all but the easiest unscripted events or send him out there to garble his message and feed the trolls. His Thursday press conference revealed a mind fully in command of governing matters but too uneven in presentation to mount a disciplined, modern campaign or overcome his biggest liability with voters.

How does Biden pull ahead under those circumstances? How does he gain the six-or-so points he needs to build an Electoral College-proof lead?

If the campaign had answers, they’d probably have shared them with allies by now. I don’t think they do, and they haven’t done much to inspire trust anyhow. The best they can hope for is a grey swan. It’s not impossible to imagine voters awakening to the fact that things are much better under Biden than they were under Trump, that being uninspired by an old and meandering president isn’t worse than fascism. That, like French voters, they’ll form a unified front, left-through-center, to protect democracy. 

Not impossible, but not clearly in the offing, either. In France, where multiple parties govern in coalition, candidates and voters can make strategic decisions to maximize anti-fascist power. Here, we’d need to see third-party voters flock to Biden, or third-party candidates suspend their campaigns and endorse him. That hasn’t happened, and surely won’t—for one thing, the third-party campaigns are essentially Trump sock puppets.

Moreover, voters viewed Biden unfavorably long before the debate, and if the debate makes us rethink anything it’s this: Why have voters been so down on him? 

Biden has presided over a long period of full employment and rising wages. He saved the country from Donald Trump, and then from the wreckage Trump bequeathed him. His presidency has been legislatively transformative, and the biggest bills he’s signed, both partisan and bipartisan, have all been popular.

The sting he and his supporters feel over these calls for a new nominee is a manifestation of pride in this record. Biden has taken unfair heat since the earliest days of his presidency and his supporters view the succession push is just the latest and most egregious example. What really matters is his job performance, and in that regard he’s more than earned dibs on a second term. 

I have felt this way myself. Because Biden has governed well, I’ve chalked his unpopularity up to factors like Republican propaganda, Democratic agenda-setting incompetence, and mainstream media failures. 

Those factors surely all contributed. But post-debate, we should consider another: For most of the past three and a half year, Biden has lacked the vigor and clarity to effectively attack his opponent, defend his record, and sell a vision for the future.

Biden’s debate performance didn’t just create a thorny new problem, it shined a bright light on an old one. The only way to solve it is with a new leader.

NO MCCAIN, NO GAIN

Biden’s advisers know he’s losing. They admitted as much to Senate Democrats on Thursday. They also know that risky gambits are sometimes necessary when you’re behind. That’s why Biden challenged Trump to an early debate!

With that failed effort behind us, though, the names on the ticket are the only big variables that remain entirely in their control. Replacing Biden with Kamala Harris or another candidate wouldn’t create any guarantee of victory, but it would represent a sharp turn off the current course toward slow, agonizing defeat. 

The key difference between 2008 and now is that Democrats aren’t even casually entertaining candidates or running mates who are unfit for office. Harris is already the duly-elected vice-president. The senators and governors whose names get kicked around in contested-convention scenarios are all fit to serve. We aren’t going to learn that Harris (or Josh Shaprio or Gretchen Whitmer or Roy Cooper or Andy Beshear) are secret ignoramuses willing to rend the fabric of America in pursuit of fame and power. 

A ticket comprising any two of them could obviously go on to lose despite being much younger than Biden. But in contemplating defeat to Donald Trump, the guide star has to be doing everything within responsible bounds to win. Not insuring Biden gets to give it the ol’ college try. Not, as many anonymous Democrats have it, whether it might be easier to say nothing and let the incumbent absorb the blame in defeat.

McCain’s downfall was overdetermined. He was old and stiff, his opponent was a rock star. The incumbent president was a hideously unpopular failure and the economy was on the brink of collapse. The fundamentals, as the nerds like to say, were against him. 

That isn’t the case today! The fundamentals for Democrats are pretty good. But the fundamentals seemingly can’t rescue an 81 year old incumbent who has difficulty articulating his thoughts and has lost the confidence of his congressional party. The best hope for America at the moment is to remove those unique liabilities, so that fundamentals can reassert themselves.