Calling For Biden To Retire Is No Longer Knee-Jerk; Doubling Down On Him Is
Confronting him with his weaknesses as a candidate can and should be part of a hard-nosed effort to convey the existential urgency of beating Donald Trump.
Back in winter, when pundits and analysts were first toying with the idea that Joe Biden should yield to a new nominee and retire after one term, I argued that their concerns about his ability to mount a vigorous campaign were valid, but that it was both too late and too early to make the case definitively.
To the extent those concerns were widespread, it would’ve made sense for a credible Democrat (someone other than Marianne Williamson or Dean Phillips) to mount a primary campaign against him starting in the middle of last year. But once that window had closed it didn’t make sense to ditch Biden out of nowhere in March, so long before the Democratic nominating convention.
We didn’t know then how well he’d hold up in polling data against Trump once people started tuning in. His surrogates argued, both explicitly and implicitly, that Biden’s good-faith critics should give it a few weeks or months—they held confidently that Biden would open up a lead this spring, as people remembered all the things they hated about the Trump presidency, and it’d be relatively smooth sailing from there.
My view was: Ok, let’s hold them to that.
Now spring has passed. It’s early summer. Biden has not opened a lead. And after watching Thursday night’s disastrous debate, I’m here to make good on my view: It’s time not just for me to say Biden should step aside, but for them to do so as well.
Insisting Biden should suspend his campaign in March was knee jerk. It was still possible to imagine that Biden would prove himself comfortably up to the task of beating Trump, if not literally the best possible candidate in the party. Now it’s the other way around: insisting that Biden is ideally suited or even well-suited to this task is deeply naive.
With the limited time and tools left available to them, replacing the top of the ticket is the sober, steady-handed move, while forging ahead as though there’s no other choice, simply because the alternative is scary, is the stubborn, petulant one. The only way out is not through. There is another way.