The Democratic Doom Loop Of Timidity

Too timid to tackle Biden's main liability directly; too timid to challenge him over it

(Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)

This post is for everybody, but the real target audience comprises the Democrats depicted in Jonathan Martin’s Wednesday column last week: rank-and-file lawmakers who are genuinely petrified by President Biden’s political liabilities heading into next year’s election, but also too petrified to say or do anything meaningful about it. 

If you fit that description, hang tight for a minute. If you’re just a regular reader and have the time, please do give that column a look (though, note, I don’t agree with every word) and then take another look at or reflect on what I wrote in my introductory piece three weeks ago. Particularly this part: 

Today…we see a party that suppresses misgivings about its leaders, too insecure about the relative popularity of its own values to feel comfortable grappling with internal dissent. You’re expected either to rage against Joe Biden for not endorsing all 117 items on a laundry-list agenda nobody's heard of; or you’re supposed to pretend not to understand that an old guy who stutters is a suboptimal spokesperson for a major political party. You’re expected to take it for granted that everything is terrible, or to clap for the Democrats and encourage others to clap along. 

Martin has framed up his column as an exposé of Biden’s state of denial, and the bubble he’s created to shelter himself from uncomfortable conversations about his age. But I actually think it works better as an exposé of Democratic Party psychology.

Democrats are stuck in a doom loop of timidity and now it’s saddled them with an insoluble problem. Fears about Biden’s ability to mount a vigorous candidacy against Donald Trump or serve another full term are widespread. I’d guess that if the DNC asked members to vote secret ballot, more than half would name someone other than Biden as the party’s ideal 2024 nominee. But nearly all Democrats other than the ones most desperate to create distance from Biden—e.g. frontline House Democrats—are determined to muffle these doubts for petty or insecure reasons. Petty are the ones who ask themselves whether they might beat Biden in a primary and go on to become president, but choose to stay silent because it’d be a smaller personal risk to wait until 2028. Insecure are the ones who think a competitive primary might be good for the party, but might also backfire—what if Biden survives the primary but goes on to lose next November? Will Trump 2.0 be my fault? Will people blame me? Will my political career be over?

These Democrats ought to reconsider whether lockstep loyalty is really a win-win proposition after all—good for ambitious climbers and the incumbent leadership alike. They’ve spent the last two-and-a-half years cheering for the team and refusing to engage with valid criticism of Biden, and thus find themselves without a straightforward basis for putting their precariously unpopular leader to the test. 

Obviously they could, in theory, turn on Biden out of nowhere, with no predicate: We’re just listening to the people! When we host town-hall events or conduct polls, voters say they’re really uneasy about Biden’s age and we can’t put off their concerns any longer.

But that isn’t an easy sell as a rationale for primarying Biden.

First it points to an obvious question: Where have you been?!

Second, it raises another: Do you think his age has interfered with his job performance? Are you mounting or ginning up a primary challenge because you question his actual leadership or are you just following polls?

And this is where the rah rah aspect of liberal politics comes back to bite: Approximately nobody has raised significant concerns about any facet of Biden’s presidency and thus won’t be able to make a case for new leadership that doesn’t amount to: he’s been a great president but too many people think he’s old, so vote for me; I’ll do the job as well as he’s doing it but I’m younger.

That’s unsatisfying. I imagine it’d be unsatisfying even to the young-skewing voters who’d normally support a Democratic president but tell pollsters they’re not ride-or-die for Biden. Believing Biden is too old for the job doesn’t imply a preference for a Democrat whose main distinction is bloodless opportunism. 

And the most maddening thing is, it didn’t have to shake out this way.

I say all this as someone who thinks Biden has on balance been a very good president, but worries about his ability to confront the rigors of a modern campaign. “Like Biden but young” is actually a pretty good candidate pitch to me specifically. But it coheres much better to also articulate where Biden has erred in leadership, and ideally to connect those errors to his age.

I think back more than I should to the aggressive spin campaign the party waged earlier this year after Biden coughed up ransoms to Republicans, rewarding their debt-limit extortion.

At the time I wrote (in piece after piece, in fact!) that it was a significant betrayal of an important party commitment not to get sucked back into the horrible hostage dynamics of Obama’s first term, and that it created an opening for ambitious young Democrats to say, Enough! We deserve leaders who have the savvy not to fall into predictable traps. It’s not just that Biden’s old, physically. It’s that he therefore lacks the right mindset for opposing the Trump-era GOP—his nostalgia for his early career, now 50 years bygone, has clouded his judgment about who Republicans are and how they should be dealt with.

This was (putting it mildly) not a popular take at the time, but I think it has worn well. The debt-limit deal no longer looks like some coup for Democrats, Biden didn’t outwit Kevin McCarthy so much as outwit himself by treating McCarthy as someone who could be trusted. And, worse, it appears to have kicked off a terrible new era of small ransoms: Spending cuts for avoiding default, aid to Ukraine for keeping the government open just six weeks, who knows what to fund the government for a whole year. All paid by Democrats to Republicans.

And though at a glance, none of that has anything to do with what voters say they care about (Biden’s age), I do think it crystalizes those concerns in ways that neither Biden nor his intraparty skeptics appreciate.

Biden and his advisers have tried to dispel age concerns in what I believe is a misguided way. They have responded to an atmospheric challenge—voters have a sense that he’s too old—by ticking off accomplishments on a checklist of youth-approved policy objectives. Biden may be old, but he’s fighting for student-loan forgiveness; he may be old but he passed the biggest climate bill in history. Please clap. 

In unsatisfying reality, though, the people who complain about Biden’s age are actually concerned about Biden’s age, not with the fear that, because he’s old, he’s inadequately fixated on the climate crisis.

That problem can’t be solved biologically, and it can’t be solved with tangential policy gestures, important and righteous as they might be on their own terms. It might be deferred with a bit of candor (I think Biden would do well to tell these voters that their concerns are reasonable, and that party will address them systemically going forward). But they’re more readily addressed atmospherically: by counteracting the visible toll of age with passion and vigor—by, e.g., not negotiating the terms of your own surrender to Kevin McCarthy. 

I don’t know if a competitive primary would be the best thing for Biden, Democrats, or the country right now. (I do know that the apprehension stems mostly from over-reading the much different circumstances of the Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush presidencies.) But I fear the party as a whole is rapidly bypassing all credible ways to address Biden’s main liability, whether they were to come from Biden himself or from a challenger. And it’s because they’ve built whole institutions and career trajectories out of their preference for avoiding elephants in rooms.