Joe Biden Has Given America A Fighting Chance
That fight, against spooked and dissembling Republicans, needs to begin now
Hello readers, given the urgency of the news, I’ve taken the liberty of publishing Monday’s essay on Sunday evening, and making it free to all subscribers. On Monday afternoon, I’ll host a special live chat for paid members. I hope you’ll join.
I won’t dwell too long on President Biden’s selflessness—much of what I’d write would go without saying anyhow. This newsletter will dwell largely on what Biden’s decision not to seek a second term reveals about the political moment, and (thus) what we should hope to see happen next.
But I do think Biden’s choice not to accept the Democratic nomination deserves recognition from those of us who argued he should stand aside, and who’d grown impatient with his initial reluctance. It is true that this decision could have come sooner. That would have spared the Democratic Party two weeks of agita, infighting, and dread. But those wounds are superficial. They will heal and be forgotten in days, and in hindsight we will appreciate how quickly Biden brought himself to do something unthinkably hard: to see past his sense of pride, even his own mortality, when those things came into conflict with the national interest.
A couple weeks ago I wrote, “we’ll soon discover…whether Biden is traversing the stages of grief as he mourns his own political death, or whether he’s lodged in permanent denial,” and now we can see which it was. The debate three weeks ago confronted Biden with a choice that fused the difficult fiduciary duties all American presidents face with the most wrenching of personal concerns, and he reached a decision in a way that’s hard to second guess: as an imperfect but decent human.
Donald Trump chose to run for president a third consecutive time to escape prison and plunder the country.
Joe Biden has decided not to run for president, an act of total selflessness, to give the country its best fighting chance to stop him.
The contrast in character is total. And the dividends and lessons are already becoming clear.
This edition of Off Message is free, but I hope you’ll take the opportunity to become a paid member.
Over the past weeks and months, Off Message has been a steady guide to this unprecedented predicament. Our community took the theory of a candidate succession seriously, but understood the circumstances that might result in one would be unprecedented. When it arrived we were ready, and we knew that the uncertainty surrounding the idea would largely dissipate if and when Biden made his wishes clear.
We saw the world steady and saw it clear. And we can now see the merit of the Off Message tagline: “vigorous internal debate isn't a weakness—it's essential.
Biden’s decision has given the Democratic Party a window of narrative dominance. It’s the biggest story in politics, and most Americans will come to understand its significance on Democratic terms—that Biden did something fundamentally patriotic, when he realized his campaign, under his direction as an 81 year old man, had created an intolerable risk of allowing Donald Trump to become president again.
It’s thoroughly fitting that Democrats spent Sunday afternoon giving Biden the hero’s exit he deserves and preparing to switch gears for a different campaign. But that campaign should begin rapidly, because Republicans will not stand aside to allow Democrats space to grapple with their raw emotion.
They will begin smearing and lying about Kamala Harris right away, and if the past several years have taught us anything it’s this: their lies will take root if they are not vigorously contested.
The debate three weeks ago called the question, but Biden had already been grievously wounded over the course of years in a lopsided partisan information environment. Biden and Democrats generally chose to float above the fray as Republicans smeared them. They absorbed attacks trivial and damaging, over Dr. Seuss and corruption and fitness for office, when they should have responded to them. The upshot was to wreck Biden’s appeal. Against the backdrop of a successful presidency and a white hot economy, Biden’s approval collapsed and then continued to erode. It ultimately made him so politically weak that it forced him not to seek a second term, while Trump—an incoherent old man in his own right, whose presidency ended in failure and disgrace—has hardly suffered. This should mark the moment when Democratic elites finally realized they over-invested in the idea that politics mostly boils down to material prosperity and inoffensive rhetorical appeals. Biden delivered as president. He saved the country and rebuilt the economy. He was nevertheless doomed by atmospherics, and the Democrats who wisely realized he couldn’t mount a winning campaign reached that conclusion in spite of the fundamentals, not because of them.
Through all this, Biden has been running neck-and-neck with Trump, even “winning,” in the FiveThirtyEight model despite being behind in just about every poll because the fundamentals for him are so strong. Because he’s the incumbent, because he built a bull economy. All of that stuff became overwhelmed by mass perception. And the Democrats who recognized he’d massively underperform the fundamentals rooted their understanding in Biden’s ability to control narrative rather than economic conditions: Biden was not going to be able to prosecute a case against Trump or for himself. When the chips were down, the party of kitchen-table politics and steady-handed governing realized they’d lost the information environment and that unless they could regain some control over it, they were doomed.
The succession to a new ticket, almost certain to be led by Harris, has rattled Republicans badly.
They will say all manner of nonsense in the hope of making this transition turbulent. Their vice presidential nominee JD Vance has intimated that if Biden isn’t fit enough to run for re-election and serve another full term, then he isn’t fit enough to serve out the next six months. It’s the kind of argument an intelligent person can only make in bad faith.
They tried to psyche Biden and his allies out of making this decision by suggesting it might somehow not be legal for Biden to withdraw from the race. They’ve pretended to believe that the winner of a primary (a Democratic primary, anyhow) is obligated by law to accept the nomination and run for office even if they decide the right thing for themselves and the country is to retire.
They’re making risible arguments, and may well file frivolous lawsuits, because they’re terrified. Everything they’ve said and done since the debate reveals their collective judgment: Donald Trump can beat Joe Biden, but maybe only Joe Biden.
Democrats should begin exploiting that fear and responding muscularly to their bad-faith arguments right away—not after they’ve selected a nominee, not after the convention, now.
Over the past couple weeks, a number of liberal elites and Biden allies argued for bowing to those GOP threats. Stick with Biden, because if we don’t they’ll take us to court and maybe Biden’s name will end up on the ballot after all.
I understand the impetus—advocacy doesn’t obligate people to make rigorous arguments, just effective ones. But I want them to understand how harmful the instinct is, so that they won’t indulge it again. It’s leading with the chin against authoritarianism in the most direct sense. Chest-puffing Republicans who pretend to believe Biden can’t withdraw from the race claim the power to force their will on the other party, and pick their own maximally vulnerable opponent. They claim the authority to force Democrats to place Biden’s name in nomination and force states to put his name on ballots, even as he’s chosen to retire.
That idea is not compatible with a free and fair election, and it must be rejected. It shouldn’t be complied with even if the judiciary orders it, but it certainly shouldn’t be preemptively surrendered to.
Over the past month, as Trump’s standing in the race has improved and his second term began to seem much more likely than not, we saw institutional actors across the country begin doing what scholars of authoritarianism specifically warn against: obeying in advance. By optimizing to defeat Trump in this drastic, self-sacrificing way, Biden is offering an implicit reminder that we don’t need to cower, that we have agency and can resist enemies of democracy to the end. His closest allies should heed that lesson.
President Joe Biden is a bigger person than any of us can be. To honor him we have to work like hell is around the corner to elect Kamala Harris as our Next President of the United States of America
A friend who is a Biden delegate from CA reports that the CA party chair has sent out endorsement forms to all members of the CA delegation—let’s see Dems everywhere endorse Kamala wholeheartedly and come out with flamethrowers against the GOP. This is an energizing moment and I hope Dems don’t waste it with handwringing. We don’t have to cower! Love this, Brian!!