Do the nation’s top Democrats think Joe Biden should go (as they tell each other in terrified private) or stay the course (as they hedge for public consumption)? Is Jill Biden Edith Wilson, an overprotective First Lady clinging to power in the face of her husband’s obvious infirmity? Would Kamala Harris (or anyone else) make a stronger opponent against Donald Trump?
Who knows?
Here’s what we do know: the Democrats have only themselves to blame.
For months, perhaps years, Biden’s closest aides and partisan enablers have indulged their candidate, and our president, with the fallacy of the boiling frog. They lulled themselves into shielding his diminished capacities as the water of the 2024 campaign grew gradually hotter around him until—in the flame of his debate with Trump, and apparently to their own shock—Biden went belly-up. How else to explain why they let him do it?
It wasn’t an irrational strategy for an aging candidate who in his 50 years in politics has never been a reliable ad lib performer—and who would be 86 at the end of a second term. But it was a mighty risky one, as is now apparent. In his Thursday night NATO news conference—his first in eight months—the president gave cogent answers on foreign policy, was shaky at other moments, yet insisted, “I’m just gonna keep moving.” Immediately after his performance, three more Democratic members of Congress urged him to step aside.
Team Biden’s determination to brazen ahead despite the president’s evident physiological and political weaknesses is an even riskier strategy—for their reputations, for the well-being of the man they purport to serve, and perhaps most of all for the country they presumably love. Does the fate of democracy hang on the courage and candor of George Clooney?
Biden’s innermost circle of advisers is just small enough—and I have been covering politics just long enough—that I happen to know virtually all of them personally, and I’m unwilling to impute other than honorable motives to any of them. They are smart, and decent, and experienced. They seem to sincerely believe that their guy is still the last best hope of earth, or at least the Democrats’ last best chance to defeat Trump. They may be right. But if they are wrong, the rest of us will pay an awful price.
One of those advisers, the lawyer Bob Bauer, who played Trump in Biden’s debate prep, has just published a memoir, The Unraveling: Reflections on Politics Without Ethics and Democracy in Crisis, in which he laments his own past adherence to the partisan “warrior mentality” of winning at any cost. He is a thoughtful, ethical person and has served at high levels in government and campaigns for years.
Yet two days after the debate, the Biden strategist Jen O’Malley Dillon issued a memo notable for its bloodless insistence that the president’s shaky, unsettling performance had not counted at all. “On every metric that matters, data shows it did nothing to change the American people’s perception,” she wrote. Leave aside the moral truth of that assertion—and subsequent polling showing that the debate has, indeed, changed public perception of the president’s fitness. Such bluster obscures the objective reality that at nine p.m. on an ordinary Thursday in late June, the president of the United States … was not all there.
Does the fate of democracy hang on the courage and candor of George Clooney?
If O’Malley Dillon’s memo is not a distillation of a win-at-any-cost mentality, it’s hard to say what would be. It may have been narrowly factual, but it was intellectually dishonest (alas, not uncommon in today’s political discourse). It is notable that in the two weeks after the debate, Biden’s advisers shrank from putting him in the kinds of open-ended public settings that could resolve Nancy Pelosi’s telling, still unanswered question: Was Biden’s bad debate “an episode” or “a condition”? It is impossible to escape the conclusion that Biden’s handlers continue to avoid such settings because they now know for certain that their man is not up to the task—at least not consistently.
That implies a level of deception by omission—or at least a level of wishful thinking—that has been seen before in American politics. In 1944, as Franklin Roosevelt faced a stiff Republican challenge to a fourth term, he was dying of congestive heart failure. His doctors knew it but, by the best evidence, did not even tell him, and he never so much as asked. Much of the public suspected something was gravely wrong, and his health was a major issue in the campaign. His family and most trusted aides felt varying degrees of alarm, but they soldiered on nevertheless. The president rode in an open car through a bitter-cold rain in the streets of New York City and made a devastatingly funny speech about Republican attacks on his dog. It was enough. Just.
“He looked like an invalid who had been allowed to see guests for the first time and the guests had stayed too long,” Labor Secretary Frances Perkins testified a year or so later. In No Ordinary Time, her moving book about the Roosevelts during World War II, Doris Kearns Goodwin recorded the scene in early 1945. “Sometimes, Perkins recalled, Roosevelt could go in a matter of hours ‘from looking pretty well to looking very badly,’ almost as if the spring of his remarkable vitality had suddenly snapped. His eyes would assume a glassy look, his jaw would slacken, and his mouth would droop. His fatigue at that point was apparently so deep that he was not even aware that he had lost control of the muscles in his face.” F.D.R. died on April 12, 82 days after being sworn in.
When the world was a simpler place, Woodrow Wilson spent the last 15 months of his presidency after a devastating stroke “residing more than presiding” in the White House, his biographer A. Scott Berg wrote.
Since the Biden-Trump debate, there has been extensive and unrebutted reportage that this president has bad days and better days—and deep, abiding uncertainty about the balance between Biden’s degree of residency and presidency. He himself has said he needs to get more sleep and shouldn’t work after eight p.m. Sometimes, his mouth hangs open as if he’s not aware. Sometimes, he still seems to have it more or less together. Sometimes, he does not. The Biden strategists’ arguments for his continued candidacy are defiantly reductionist: the Democratic base, Black voters, ordinary Americans, still support him, they say. (If that were really true, he’d be leading in the polls, as he did throughout the 2020 general-election campaign.)
By week’s end, it appeared that petrified Democratic congressional and party leaders were still grappling for ways to persuade him to reconsider his course.
Eighty years ago, F.D.R.’s aides consoled themselves that their beloved boss with half a tank left would be better than Thomas E. Dewey clicking on all cylinders—and that in the worst case, Harry Truman would not be a half-bad bet to preserve the New Deal’s legacy.
Despite Biden’s considerable legislative accomplishments, he is no F.D.R., though his advisers appear to have made something very like their predecessors’ desperate calculus about a boss whose strong record and good intentions they see as self-evident, with a President Harris as the fail-safe heir if needed any time before January 20, 2029.
It’s a quaint conundrum of the political trade that none of them can say so out loud. But to let them kid us that they are doing—or hoping for—anything else, or anything more, is to conspire in the same sad self-deception that has brought us to this unhappy pass.
Todd S. Purdum is a former New York Times political reporter and the author of Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution
