After months of obsessing over the presidential election, it was shocking last week to tune in to the annual Veterans Day commemoration at Arlington National Cemetery and to see President Biden takes center stage. The all but forgotten president is too literally a lame duck; his gait has given way to a shuffle. He looks lost. He tried to convey strength in his tribute, but you braced yourself for the verbal outbursts.
Why did Biden think he could serve four more years?
He is so far removed from the politician I supported for 40 years, from the Senate to the vice presidency to the White House. Initially, I respected his judgment not to retire, as the Democrats did. Biden turned 80 at the end of 2022, but he celebrated unusually good midterm election results for his party and one of the most successful first two years of any president (not counting the withdrawal from Afghanistan). He had secured groundbreaking legislation, such as the Infrastructure Act, that will deliver benefits for years to come.
And for the next four, Donald Trump will steal the bragging rights.
In the meantime is the moment when Biden should have announced that he would no longer run, that he would be the candidate “bridge” to new leaders, as he had said in 2020. That he selfishly conceded far too late in 2024 helped undermine Democrats’ chances of retaining the White House, dealing a blow to his own legacy. History will be kinder to him than Democrats currently are, let alone voters, but that’s little consolation now.
Now, however, it is time for his party to look ahead. More than a week after the voters’ verdict, the Democrats should quit the finger pointing. They can look back long enough to identify and learn from the mistakes that enabled the election of a former president who still denies his 2020 defeat, tried to reverse it, incited an insurrection and rejected the peaceful transfer of power – all odious firsts.
What comes next is the confrontation with Trump, whose early decisions – Fox News host Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense! Matt Gaetz for Attorney General! Elon Musk as de facto vice president! – suggest the radicalism and transgression that lie ahead.
Moreover, their recriminations obscure the fact that Kamala Harris ran a close race, almost certainly closer than Biden would have done.
When all the votes are ultimately counted, Trump’s margin of victory will be two percentage points or less — the smallest since 1968. Democrats did not expect to maintain their narrow majority in the Senate even if Harris prevailed, and their candidates won in several states she lost. , limiting Republicans’ new majority. Republicans have retained the majority in the House of Representatives, but just barely – and we have seen how stymied they are by their divisions when they run out of votes.
For all the Democrats’ self-flagellation about appearing arrogant in reaching out to Americans, especially on the transgender rights issue that Trump used so effectively against Harris, voters in many cases sided with them on ballot measures for abortion rights, a higher minimum wage and mandatory paid leave , even in red states. Trump vows mass deportations, but exit polls show that a majority of voters believe undocumented immigrants should be able to apply for legal status, which Democrats favor.
The immigration issue was one of the three “I’s” that damned Democrats in general, along with inflation and Biden’s rule. Harris, who was overly deferential to the man who took her to the next level, not only didn’t do enough to separate herself from the unpopular president, she also gave Trump’s advertisers a gift when she told a friendly inquisitor from “The View” who “doesn’t occur to her” that she would have done differently than Biden. That was a rare mistake for Harris in a challenging, late-starting campaign, but a big one.
The only thing worse than the Democrats backbite would be denial. The Democrats do not deny this. They acknowledge that Trump’s gains over his previous performances have been staggering their width. He did better in most counties, including Democrats’ urban bastions and even the Bronx and Queens district represented by the left icon Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “The working class doesn’t buy the ivory tower nonsense the far left is selling,” Bronx Rep. Richie Torres tweetedincluding “absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’ or ‘From the River to the Sea’ or ‘Latinx.’ It doesn’t matter that neither Biden nor most Democrats used these terms; they haven’t pushed back much either.
Trump’s wresting of the working class from the Democrats is almost complete. The only question is whether the support is unique to him or will transfer to post-Trump Republicans.
As annoying as the Democrats’ bickering is, it is a sign of a healthy party look within after losing. That the Republican Party did not do this after defeats in 2018, 2020 and 2022 – and repeated Trump’s anti-democratic denials in 2020 – is a symptom of the ill health under his rule, despite this year’s victories. Democrats rightly lament that the far left has had too much influence, if not real power, but the far right not only influences the Republican Party but leads it. That will be a problem in the future.
For now, though, the problems are the Democrats’. What has helped make erosion in cities and suburbs so catastrophic is that they long ago left rural America. It’s time to rebuild in both places, or at least try.
The party has a solid foundation for the reconstruction that lies ahead. One of the talents, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, offered constructive advice in a New York Times op-ed Tuesday — he had me at “I Refuse to Play the Blame Game” — though his Rx mostly described what Democrats are already doing or trying to do, like expanding affordable health care. Still, it’s a start.
In the meantime, one of the party’s major problems will quickly resolve itself: in two months, Biden will finally have to relinquish the stage.
@jackiekcalmes
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
