To Defeat Trump, Democratic Party Must Replace Biden Before It’s Too Late
Following the first general election debate between two presumptive nominees on June 27, 2024, if the Democrats pushed the panic button with regard to Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy, they were doing a service to their country and to the party. They weren’t in denial. Those who still tried to shield Joe Biden’s debate performance and implicitly his fitness to serve as the president of the USA for the next four years (He will be 86 at the end of his second term) argued that it was “a slow start but strong finish.” But, their poor defense seemed to be drowned in the shrill by others in the party who couldn’t countenance a Donald Trump victory in November.
In case of a Biden defeat, many inconvenient questions will be raised. The first among them being a decision taken in Nov 2022 jointly by Joe Biden and his wife, Dr Jill Biden to repeat his candidacy in 2024. Although Joe Biden’s age-issue was already in circulation, the White House appointees kept this in wraps or gave the best spin. They claimed Joe Biden would make a great difference to the Democrats’ campaign. Now, the Democrats were saying, ” yes, he did make the difference by sinking the campaign.”
At the debate, compared to Donald Trump, Joe Biden appeared to be a feeble candidate on foreign policies too. He said at one time Hamas as a terrorist organization must be ‘eliminated.’ The truth is his administration wasn’t able to secure release of American-Israeli hostages following the Oct 7 Hamas attack. In a sign of capitulation, Hamas was given the status of a co-equal on the negotiating table with the US and Israel. He sounded weak on Afghanistan and Ukraine also.
Afghanistan and Charlottesville were the issues Joe Biden shouldn’t have brought up in the debate. They, among many other topics, invited avoidable attacks from Donald Trump. Although negotiations for the US withdrawal from Afghanistan began in the Trump period, the actual withdrawal took place under Biden’s watch. Fact checkers or analysts kept verifying or discussing the truth according to their predilections, but Trump appeared a strong and decisive leader compared to a feeble, meek and soft-spoken Biden. There might have been one Charlottesville that brought out the racial divide in America, according to Trump. But he did underline the point that the antisemitic, pro-Palestine demonstrations or riots on the campuses of the US Universities and cities were Charlottesville many times over. He asserted that leaders like Xi of China, Putin of Russia, or Kim of North Korea or Hamas wouldn’t have thought about messing with the USA if a strong president like him had been in the White House. In an election contest, assertions of this nature get traction with many voters.
For the next couple of months, the Democrats will have a debate going on between two schools of thought: one will be in favor of replacing the candidate on the Democratic party ticket and the second will be opposed to this knee-jerk reaction and hope that the subsequent performance of Biden in September would be better. Biden’s campaign agreed to an early debate with Trump anticipating they would consolidate the prospect of winning the image war with Trump well ahead of time. But, alas,Biden’s poor debate performance turned out to be a referendum on himself.
Following the startling and shocking debate night for the Democrats, leading newspapers and journalists mostly friendly or sympathetic to president Biden, came out openly and joined the chorus for the replacement of Biden on the top of the party ticket.
Tom Friedman, a New York Times Foreign Affairs opinion columnist and Biden’s friend for 23 years, wrote: “I had been ready to give Biden the benefit of the doubt up to now.. I found him up to the job. He clearly is not any longer. His family and his staff had to have known that..If he insists on running and he loses to Trump .. his staff and party members who enabled him — will not be able to show their faces.”
Bret Stephens, a conservative opinion columnist, also with the New York Times, was caustic. He wrote, “..this is also a time to ask questions of those who saw the president and insisted there was nothing seriously amiss, or that his verbal stumbles were just a function of his stutter, or that his voice may be soft but his thoughts are clear. Were they clueless? Dishonest? Choosing to not see?..[T]hey bear some of the blame for trying to prop up a mentally unwell incumbent in order to stop a morally unfit challenger.”
Maureen Dowd, also of the New York Times who has known Biden since 1987 said, “He’s being selfish. He’s putting himself ahead of the country. He’s surrounded by opportunistic enablers. He has created a reality distortion field where we’re told not to believe what we’ve plainly seen. His hubris is infuriating. He says he’s doing this for us, but he’s really doing it for himself. She went on adding, “His wife and staff will build their protective wall ever higher and shoo away reporters, pressing on the age spiral, ever more vigorously. But Biden, Jill and Democratic leaders have to face the fact that this is an extraordinarily risky bet, with — as they drum into us — democracy on the line.”
Colleagues like Barrack, Nancy or Kamala dismissed Joe Biden’s performance as just one bad debate night; all campaign staff buttressed that viewpoint. Quentin Fulks, Joe Biden’s Deputy campaign manager, claimed: “Nothing fundamentally changed about this election last night.” Jen O’Malley Dillon, the top campaign strategist, even went to the extent of saying that any drop in the polls would be the result of “overblown media narratives.”
The commentators on TV also gave their own spin. Kate Bedingfield, a former Biden’s aide, claimed on CNN that the race hadn’t “fundamentally changed” after the debate. The fact is that according to the latest CBS news polls Biden’s approval rating had gone from 35 to 27%; 72% of voters were already saying that Biden was “cognitively not fit”, only 29% affirming he had the ‘mental acuity’ to do the job. 70% believed the country was going in the wrong direction.
Winning candidates have, in the past, performed poorly in debates: Barack Obama against Mitt Romney in 2012, Ronald Reagan against Walter Mondale in 1984. Both won resoundingly. In Biden’s case, it was the issue of cognitive decline that rarely reverses. We see that in elderly people every day: vacant expression, incoherent thoughts and garbled words. The New York Times Editorial Board, otherwise very supportive of Biden’s presidency, noted that sometimes Biden couldn’t get to the end of a sentence. The crucial question was, could a person like him be the president of the USA for the next four years beginning 2025? According to The New Yorker, another Liberal paper, Biden “went to pieces” on CNN in front of an estimated 51.3 million viewers who had tuned in that night.
Historically, in Democracies all over the world, the wretched Party System lorded over by certain (charismatic) leaders, invariably make the playing field uneven and rig the game. This applies to both Donald Trump and Joe Biden too. The average voters become either enamored by the demagoguery of their preferred leader or turn outright cynical. The standard of American politics has gone so low that on the presidential debate stage, Biden called Trump a felon to which Trump retorted, “your son is a felon.” The president accused his challenger of having sext with a porn star, “while your wife was pregnant.” Whereas there’s a string of lies and deceit associated with Trump, Biden’s record is also not clean (Just recently, he falsely claimed his son’s laptop was some sort of “Russian plant” operation being run by the Kremlin).
Also, the popular party leaders in a democracy, blinded by their hubris, surround themselves with henchmen and sycophants. A coterie of vested interests doesn’t let their master see the reality around themselves. The power gets centralized and grassroots leaders or workers are ignored.
In the just concluded May-June, 2024 elections in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was misled by the same hubris that cost his party a majority in the House.
In the US, there’s a precedent where the major presidential burden of an aging Ronald Reagan was borne by his wife, Nancy Reagan. The case of Biden, if elected to the second term, will not be different. Donors and well wishers of Biden have expressed their anxiety. Scores of candidates running on Democratic party tickets for such positions as those of Governors, Senators or Congressmembers have become very vocal in their opposition to Biden’s retention. They foresee their electoral prospects being endangered. However, I doubt the party establishment, its elites and above all, the White House coteries led by Biden’s family would let the Democratic Party change the horse in the last lap of the race.
[Originally from Darbhanga, Bihar (India), Dr Binoy Shanker Prasad lives in Dundas, Ontario (Canada). He is a former UGC teacher fellow at JNU in India and a Fulbright Scholar in the USA. Author of scholarly works including a book, “Violence Against Minorities”, “Gandhi in the Age of Globalization” (a monograph) and a collection of poems”, Dr Prasad has taught at Ryerson University, Centennial College and McMaster University. He has also been the president of Hamilton based India-Canada Society (2006-08 and 2018-20)]
