Withdrawing from a presidential re-election campaign three months before Election Day is a momentous, world-history-altering decision that cannot be undone. President Joe Biden knew his retreat was irreversible in July when he stepped aside and threw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic presidential nomination. Biden, trailing Donald Trump in the polls (in part because of his shaky performance in their debate), was equally aware that stepping aside was an eleventh-hour, high-stakes gamble. If Harris did not achieve a come-from-behind victory over Trump, his decision to withdraw would be questionable.
Since she couldn’t do it, the best Biden could do was praise Harris for fighting the good fight. Actually, that’s the only decent thing you can do.
So it was disappointing to read from USA Today’s Wednesday report that Biden, according to an interview he gave on Sunday, believes he would have defeated Trump if he had stayed in the race.
Not only does his statement suggest that he overestimates his political skills and the country’s willingness to re-elect him (at the time, only 36% of respondents approved of the job he was doing as president), but it also mercilessly insults Harris. His statement implies that she didn’t or couldn’t do enough to win – and that he would have.
“I believe it is in the best interests of my party and the country that I resign and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term,” Biden wrote in a July 21 letter to “My fellow Americans.”
Three days later, he addressed the nation in prime time from behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. He said he believed his record, leadership and vision “deserved a second term,” but that he had “decided the best path forward was to pass the torch to a new generation.”
The 82-year-old president was sitting behind the same desk on Sunday when Susan Page, USA Today’s Washington bureau chief, asked him, “Do you think you could have won in November?”
Biden responded: “It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think so, based on the polls that….”
Before he finished, Page asked, “Do you think you would have had the strength to stay in office another four years?” Biden began by saying, “I don’t know.” He said he had no plans to challenge Trump in 2020 and only did so because “I really thought I had the best chance of beating him. But I also didn’t plan on being president when I was 85 years old, 86 years old… Who knows? So far, so good. But who knows what I will become when I am 86 years old?”
While there is something refreshing about a politician answering a yes-or-no question directly, Biden has enough experience as a politician and in diplomacy to have answered the question in a way that did not seem delusional or disrespectful.
The easiest thing to say would have been that he isn’t looking back. That the American people have spoken. That the Vice President ran a great race in tough, unprecedented conditions, and that he is proud of the work they have done together.
Instead, he suggested that polls showed he could have won.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Biden’s answer is that it appears to contradict his answer to a question Page had asked earlier in the interview: “Why do you think Democrats lost so much of their support in November?”
He said, “Well, first of all, I think, as I said, if you look around the world, almost every democracy has been ‘lost’ this time.”
As for Biden, a February 2024 Pew Research Center report shows that enthusiasm for the concept of democracy is waning around the world. But incumbents, wherever they are on the political spectrum, have had a tough time, and not just this election year. Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University, told The Associated Press a week after Trump’s 2024 victory that incumbents had been ousted in 40 of 54 elections in Western democracies since the global Covid pandemic began in 2020 .
So Biden is on solid footing when he points to global trends. But despite being aware of the anti-establishment spirit that has taken over the world and aware that anger over inflation is the driving force behind it, he has somehow managed to hold that, despite his unpopularity, despite concerns about his age, he could have won another victory. term.
Even if he believes it, he didn’t have to express that belief in a way that suggests Harris’ entry into the race was a mistake. He and the Democrats gambled. And they lost. But they gambled because it seemed so certain that they would lose if they didn’t.
Harris was stung late in the game, with her team far behind, and asked to perform a miracle. It is neither self-aware nor generous for the person who took themselves out of the game to claim that the substitution is the reason he or she lost.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
