One of the enduring themes of President Joseph Biden’s public life has been intense ambivalence about the elite institutions of American life and the well-educated, articulate and well-paid careerists who occupy those institutions.
There is resentment among the mediocre student with a stutter who grew up in Scranton and small-town Delaware and did not have the economic and educational advantages of many of the people he would soon encounter in national politics.
There is a hunger for the acclaim of these same people. During internal deliberations, advisers say, Biden appears keenly attuned to the views of aides and policy experts with Ivy League degrees and commentators from historically prestigious news organizations.
There is also a well-deserved sense of defiance. If the others are so fast and he is so slow, how come he reached the Senate at the age of thirty and is president half a century later?
Biden’s longstanding mixed feelings about the worthiness of the establishment — and, in turn, their longstanding mixed feelings about him — provide indispensable context for the explosion of unsolicited advice the president is receiving about what to do in the wake of his lackluster performance in Thursday’s election. Donald Trump.
The New York Times editorial page said this on Friday should drop out for the good of the country. The Washington Post’s opinion page said he at least canceling his weekend plans to think about it. Several prominent commentators, including, it is noted, a preponderance of white men over 60, said they were not pleased to say this but had concluded with regret that it was time for Joe to go. These voices included Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, Tom Friedman, Nicholas Kristof, Jonathan Alter, David Ignatius and former congressman Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s Morning JoeEveryone said that the chance that Biden will lose less strongly to Trump is too great to risk.
A fair question: who cares what these guys think? But there is an unmistakable answer: Biden does.
That doesn’t mean he will follow their advice. On the contrary, it may well be that the harder Biden is pushed, especially in the oracular and commanding voice of the Times editorial board, the more determined he will be to defy skeptics as part of his lifelong competition with the elite.
But the chances are slim that these voices won’t get his attention and perhaps even hurt his feelings. As colleagues have writtenBiden watches Morning Joe regularly and often quotes what he’s heard. (In this case, he’s more likely to quote Scarborough’s wife, Mike Brzezinski, who said she still wants Biden as the nominee.) Friedman, a Pulitzer-winning foreign affairs columnist for the Times, said he’s considered the president “a friend of mine” since they traveled together on an official trip after 9/11. He said he watched Biden’s weak, halting debate performance on CNN alone in a Lisbon hotel and that it “made me cry.”
Ignatius, a Washington Post foreign policy commentator, said the debate only reinforced what “became clear almost a year ago that President Biden would not run for a second term.” He did so anyway, Ignatius stated, out of ‘a combination of moral conviction, personal confidence and selfishness.’
The vociferousness and overlapping arguments of experts and editorial pages were striking. But they also underscored another reality: Just as Biden’s age and affect may make him seem like a visitor from another generation, the idea that prominent commentators have major influence on the national agenda is itself an artifact of an earlier era.
The voices calling for Biden to withdraw and call for an open Democratic convention in Chicago in August to select a more impressive candidate all said they were motivated by contempt for Trump and fear of what he might do if he were to return to power.
However, Trump and his political movement are themselves an expression of how little well-qualified establishment voices matter in the modern age. He won the Republican nomination in 2016 by defeating the Republican Party’s historic kingmakers in the business class. If editorial pages played a major role in shaping public opinion, Trump would have been driven from the national stage long ago.
Incidentally, Biden would have been the first choice in the 2020 Democratic nomination race of some of the people now advising him to face the obvious about his advancing age and declining political skills. Just as Trump sparked a movement excited by his rhetorical outrage and norm-busting behavior, Biden sparked a “bet-he-will-do-it” movement of people calculating that he could at least beat Trump. What’s uncertain is whether the op-ed pages and other voices will be the beginning of the “he-just-won’t-do-it” movement.
At the height of the Vietnam War, in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson, according to legend, watched a scathing commentary on the war from Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News and concluded: “If I lost Cronkite, I lost Middle America.”
Fifty-six years later, if Joe Biden has lost Joe Scarborough, it’s probably true that he has lost influential people in prestigious districts in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Those people mean a lot to Biden. But they will mean a lot more if they can galvanize people who have actually met voters—senior Democrats on Capitol Hill, governors—to take action. So far, there are plenty of elected officials who nod their heads in agreement with commentators—and even whisper in their ears in private—but who say no such thing in public.
