A Hell of Joe Biden's Own Making
The hubris of Biden's reelection campaign — and his presidency
Joe Biden struggled to articulate his vision for a second term in last week’s Presidential debate — and not just because he lacks a coherent platform beyond the importance of keeping Donald Trump out of the White House.1 He repeatedly froze mid-sentence. He responded to a teed-up question about abortion, perhaps the Democrats’ clearest winning issue, by talking about immigration. He declared that his administration “beat Medicare.” Instead of assuaging doubts that he was too old to be Commander in Chief, he made Trump, a man who probably couldn’t order breakfast without telling a lie, look comparatively poised.
In the wake of this disastrous performance, and a spate of Supreme Court rulings reinforcing how nightmarish a second Trump term would be, pressure is mounting on Biden to step aside and allow the Democrats to pick a new nominee. After all, Biden is seen as an avatar of political pragmatism: The genteel moderate, the veteran legislator, the guy who understands how things work and gets stuff done. However unfair he thinks the questions about his fitness are or how painful they are to acknowledge, surely he understands that the stakes of this election are too high to risk losing because voters don’t think he’s up to the job. The emphatically impatient response to these concerns from Biden’s camp is in tension with this reputed pragmatism.
Yet I see a clear connection between Biden’s refusal to stand aside now and his initial decision to run for reelection, one that also serves as a throughline to so many choices he has made in office: Arrogance. Stubborn, myopic, self-defeating faith in his own instincts. From domestic issues to foreign affairs, from his own political standing to the future of democracy, Biden’s hubris has impaired his ability to see the big picture — and may wind up putting Trump back in power.
Joe Biden has been personally unpopular for almost the entirety of his term, even beyond normal partisan splits. As many observers (like
) have noted, the inflection point in his approval rating was the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in August 2021.2 News of the Taliban’s takeover, combined with accelerating inflation and the rise of the Delta variant (just as he declared “independence from COVID-19”), upended Biden’s image as the steady hand who would clean up Trump’s messes. By the following spring it was clear that both young people and voters of color (two groups whose enthusiastic support is crucial to the Democratic coalition) were disillusioned with the administration’s torpor, and that Biden had no interest in understanding why. The Democrats’ strong results in the 2022 midterms were not because of Biden, but in spite of him — so unappealing is the modern Republican platform that Democrats won among voters who “somewhat disapprove[d]” of Biden as President.As confidence in Biden’s competence has waned, so has perception of the chief executive’s executive function. The party line had been that the media was eager to make a story out of Biden’s age, that clips of him appearing dazed were taken out of context, and that any questions of cogency in this year’s election apply even more to Donald Trump. (The last part is surely true.) Clearly the American public has not found don’t worry about it to be a convincing counterargument. Which is why his incoherence in the debate felt so damning. Barack Obama’s 2008 gaffe about visiting 57 states did not make a lasting impression (except among the birther crowd) because no one seriously doubted his intelligence or his grasp of basic facts. By contrast, Biden repeatedly losing his train of thought under the lights reinforced what voters already feared about his mental sharpness.
The risks of Biden running for reelection were apparent even before he took office. In December 2019, while Biden’s support was below 30 percent amidst a crowded Democratic primary field, reports leaked that Biden intended to seek only one term. Over the course of the 2020 campaign he described himself as a “bridge” and a “transition candidate” to the next generation of leaders. Perhaps it’s a stretch to say he outright lied about not running for a second term, since he had conspicuously declined to make such a promise publicly. But after he clearly implied that he would pass the baton in four years, the distinction is one of semantics, not ethics.
And to what end? Any pol as savvy as Biden supposedly is should have seen the warning signs. His job approval is in the gutter. Only 27 percent of voters say he is mentally fit to be President. He has trailed in the polls almost all year against the most-mendacious politician in modern American history. The joke that Biden and Trump are the only people unpopular enough to lose to each other feels too true to be funny. Establishment-oriented Democrats had previously dismissed concerns about Biden’s electability as distractions from the task of beating Trump. Now even loyal party members are seeing the situation without rose-colored glasses.
Reasonable people can disagree on what Democrats should do from here. Biden stepping aside now would look like an act of weakness, and whoever replaced him as the nominee would be stained as the known second choice. Vice President Kamala Harris, the obvious next in line, may struggle to define herself outside of Biden’s shadow, and her own electoral record is underwhelming for a Democrat in California. Most speculation about other replacements has focused on large-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer — but none would be a sure bet, especially amid the appalling optics of passing over a Black woman who is already on the ticket. At this point I would take my chances with Harris, but I respect the argument that the moment to replace Biden is already behind us.
Whatever the next steps, one thing is certain: Our current predicament stems from Biden having been too arrogant to do the right thing and step aside proactively. He ignored the compendia of polls showing him to be a uniquely unpopular candidate and reneged on his tacit bargain to seek only one term. Instead of what should be the easiest Presidential election in modern history, the Democrats must now either stick with a candidate whom most voters see as unfit for office, or suffer the shame of replacing their nominee in the middle of the race. Whatever you fear most about a second Trump administration, all of the consequences — for climate change, civil liberties, health care, abortion rights, racial justice, education, foreign affairs, the very integrity of our democratic system — all of it is at risk because of Joe Biden’s hubris.3
The maelstrom of coverage of Thursday night’s debate nearly overshadowed another huge political story on Friday: The Supreme Court overturned its 40-year-old Chevron doctrine, a bedrock of modern Constitutional law by which courts deferred to government agencies to interpret and implement their own policies. The 6-3 ruling in Loper Bright instead remands such discretion to the judiciary. In a system where the courts have been packed with reactionary ideologues, this puts questions of environmental regulation, labor protection, and food and drug safety at the mercy of right-wing activist judges.
This is another facet of Joe Biden’s legacy.
It is a stretch to say this ruling is Biden’s fault. But while he disagrees with the decision, Biden has made it clear that he supports the SCOTUS status quo, in which the conservative bloc functions as a minoritarian oligarchy, and the only recourse is to hope the Democrats are in power whenever the next few seats are vacated. Progressives have been agitating to expand the Supreme Court with liberal voices to balance out the conservative takeover. Biden made a campaign promise to study the issue, but nothing concrete came of his commission’s subsequent report. True to form, he later admitted that he had already made up his mind against Court-packing before he was elected.
In our current political environment, there is no practical difference between opposing SCOTUS reform and supporting the Roberts Court’s mission to slowly erode basic norms of progressive governance. Biden’s stubborn position that no other issue is as important as maintaining nine justices on the Supreme Court — a number that is neither prescribed in the Constitution nor has been involiable throughout U.S. history — means deprioritizing federal regulatory authority, legal protections for minority groups, and even abortion rights. Pols may be perplexed by voters who think Biden is responsible for overturning Roe. But in the two years since Dobbs, what concrete steps has he proposed to restore it?
This week brought the fresh hell of Trump v. United States, in which SCOTUS held that Presidents have “absolute” immunity in carrying out their official duties. In essence, a 6-3 majority belatedly sided with Richard Nixon, who infamously declared “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” It is at once utterly terrifying that the Court says the President is effectively unaccountable, and completely unsurprising that they ruled in Trump’s favor, albeit to an extreme degree. Could Biden, who has styled himself as uniquely capable of getting things done even in an era of hyper-polarization, have leveraged his political capital and the bully pulpit to add more Justices and prevent this calamitous decision? We’ll never know, because he had no interest in trying. He is complicit in whatever comes next, even if he lacks the self-awareness to understand why.
Biden’s myopia casts a long shadow over the news of any given day. We just witnessed the earliest recorded hurricane to reach Category 4 strength in the Atlantic, a reminder that Biden prioritized the New Cold War with China over his stated desire to foster international collaboration against climate change. This sweltering summer follows a tense spring in which Biden tacitly supported the use of excessive force against peaceful campus protestors, which he offensively framed as a stand against anti-Semitism even as riot police were deployed against disproportionately Jewish students. The ongoing national elections in Iran are surely impacted by the U.S.’ withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement, which Biden promised to rejoin, only to play hardball and scuttle diplomatic talks. A new COVID variant and the spread of avian flu have epidemiologists concerned, but this administration plainly lost interest in public health leadership years ago.
Then there’s Gaza. Biden is hardly unique among American politicians in his reflexive support for the Israeli military, but I don’t think most prominent Democrats would be so myopically brazen about it. It is specifically Biden who is bypassing Congress to supply their army with weapons. (You may ponder the wisdom of building up precedent for the President to act unilaterally in such matters ahead of a possible second Trump term.) It is his administration that has ignored its own laws about withholding aid from human-rights violators and impugned the credibility of the International Court of Justice. (More fodder for a potential rules-based-order-upender-in-waiting.) It is Scranton Joe himself who keeps lying to provide political cover for atrocities that have left tens of thousands massacred and countless more dying of famine and disease: making up an alleged Israeli ceasefire proposal, inventing moral “red line[s]” that the IDF had not crossed and then ignoring when they are violated, cravenly dismissing a doctor’s personal photos of malnourished civilians by pretending he had seen them before.
By the time you read this essay, Israel may have invaded Lebanon. The administration has reportedly been urging Israel not to expand hostilities, but in a classic Biden misunderstanding of political leverage, he has concurrently pledged American support in a potential war. Is anyone besides Biden surprised that offering Benjamin Netanyahu unconditional backing has failed to deescalate tensions?
For years Biden has cultivated a reputation of personal decency. He certainly comes off as less repugnant than Trump. Yet as someone who is sensitive about projecting goodness onto unworthy public figures, this perception has never sat right with me. Perhaps it’s possible to compartmentalize a politician’s private morality from the harms their actions cause, like the ever-more-draconian immigration policies we’ve seen from a man who once rallied supporters against “kids in cages.” There are still the matters of his inappropriate conduct with women, his history of racist and anti-Semitic remarks, his abiding anti-vaccine rhetoric and Holocaust revisionism from his advisors, and his first Presidential campaign ending in scandal when he got caught plagiarizing his alleged family history.
Biden is now failing another test of his moral character. A true leader would have the humility to recognize when his approach was not working. The selflessness to stand aside for the good of the country, to care more about beating Donald Trump than his own ego. The grace to not dismiss supporters’ concerns as “bedwetting.” By choosing to run for a second term, even as the vast majority of voters see him as unfit for the job, he is playing chicken with the fate of the republic. It’s said that pride comes before the fall. Biden’s arrogance may take the world down with him.
Which is true and fair, and I hope anyone reading this in a swing state heeds it.
Whatever mistakes he made in this process, ending the invasion of Afghanistan may be his most-positive legacy, and it is a credit to his stubbornness that he saw it through after his predecessors did not.
Of course this is not to say that any of these issues are being handled well now.
Excellent, Lewie.