Because fellow Democrats smelled his odor of weakness, the second they had the chance to pounce, they did.
Because fellow Democrats smelled his odor of weakness, the second they had the chance to pounce, they did.
A fter Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he would be dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi suggested that the “big lesson” in all this is that “bullying works.”
I suppose it all depends on what one considers “bullying” to be. Perhaps Democrats’ openly expressing concerns as to whether Biden could beat Donald Trump is “bullying,” but that seems a bit strong. It isn’t as if anyone held Biden over a toilet by his ankles and gave him a swirlie or tripped him and took his Pokémon cards. Fellow Democrats simply told him the truth: His cognitive abilities had declined to a point where it was unclear whether he could make it to the November election, much less serve four more years beyond that point.
But even if one accepts the idea that Biden was bullied, it is more telling that he received negative feedback at all. After the disastrous June presidential debate, during which it was unclear whether Biden even knew where he was, Democratic officials felt free to begin criticizing him in ways that Republicans would never criticize Trump. They simply didn’t fear Biden the way conservatives fear Trump — and this let the doubt metastasize, leading to the incumbent’s dropping out of the race.
Think of all the times Republicans could have bailed on Trump and chose not to. After the Access Hollywood tape went public in 2016, a number of Republicans began wondering aloud whether they should continue to back a genital-grabbing misanthrope, but they all quickly fell in line. When Trump was charged with more than 90 felony counts and found guilty of 34, they showed up dressed as the former president. When they could have impeached him, after he incited a coup attempt in January 2021, they almost uniformly cowered at his threats. (Being a Republican for the past ten years is like being in the movie A Quiet Place — make any noise and suddenly you’ll be face-to-face with a monster happy to relieve you of your appendages.)
So, in this sense, bullying does work. Time and time again, Trump bullied fellow Republicans into accepting his grotesque, abnormal behavior. If you were a Republican who crossed him, he would attack you online and hasten your political demise, or you would have to engage in a humiliating act of subservience to get back into his good graces. (See: Vance, J. D., and Haley, Nikki, both of whom have forever escaped the accusation that they might hold a genuine conviction.)
But bullying doesn’t work against strong people who possess the antibodies to resist it. And Biden didn’t have them. He was a weak president who frequently caved to the more extreme elements of his party and failed to properly defend his achievements. And because his fellow Democrats smelled his odor of weakness, the second they had the chance to pounce, they did.
That doesn’t mean that Biden didn’t make the right decision in bailing on the election. But he only gets half the credit because his timing worsened his party’s chances of retaking the White House. The public saw his cognitive decline years ago — even fellow Democrats were pointing it out five years ago during the 2019 Democratic-primary debates — but he put his own ego and sense of legacy ahead of what the party needed: a lengthy primary to choose an adequate successor.
Instead, he left Democrats with a flawed candidate who has only 106 days to remake her public image. Forget all the hagiographic coverage you will see of Kamala Harris in the next few days — she is even less popular than Biden. She dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary having earned 3 percent in the polls among members of her own party, never even topping 4 percent during the entire time she was in the race.
And there is no doubt that Harris will be the nominee. Sure, there are rumblings that there might be other candidates, but delegates and party leaders have quickly closed ranks behind the vice president. Some have hilariously suggested that Democrats take a month to run a mini primary, complete with debates and the like. But almost all of the candidates that would be most likely to take Harris on in such a contest (Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Arizona senator Mark Kelly, California governor Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, and so on) have already pledged her their support.
Suppose some Democrats are right and that it would make Harris seem more “legitimate” if she were to face some opposition. It might be entertaining to watch her in a staged, scripted debate in which she eviscerates lesser candidates — they could all bow down to her and say things like “You’re totally right” and “I hadn’t thought about that issue in such an intelligent way, Madame Vice President,” in exchange for jobs in a Harris administration. They could all play the role of the political Washington Generals, delighting the crowd as Harris dribbles between their legs and dunks on them. Yet even if party leaders coalesce around her, America is in for an ugly four months.
It will be fun, for example, to watch Republicans attempt to use Harris’s tenure as a public prosecutor against her. Several of Trump’s allies told the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta that “they plan to assault her left flank with accusations of Harris over-incarcerating young men of color when she was California’s attorney general.” Good luck with that. Libertarians may have a leg to stand on in opposing the drug war, but the idea that Republicans are opposed to putting people in jail for drug offenses is gut-busting comedy. Half the GOP convention centered on the supposed need for more enforcement to snuff out fentanyl. If anything, the “Kamala is a cop” meme should win her converts within the GOP.
Nonetheless, Biden’s being out of the race spares us all from having to peddle the idea that he was “one of the greatest presidents of our lifetimes,” a line of pure, uncut BS meant only to stroke his ego to get him to drop out. Now that he’s officially out, we can once again recognize that he’s a bad president supported by only 38 percent of the American public. Presumably the “greatest president” in American history would have a much higher approval rating than rapper Macklemore.
So how should we remember Joe Biden? He should be foremost known as a president so bad that the public favored a convicted felon over him. As a doddering old man who put his own ambition above the country’s and hung his friends out to dry as they lied about his physical and mental capabilities behind the scenes.
And as a weak leader who was forced out not because of “bullying” but because his own party members got over the fear of telling the truth.