What lessons can we draw from his 1987 exit from the presidential race?
What lessons can we draw from his 1987 exit from the presidential race?
I n the two weeks since President Biden’s disastrous debate performance, the political world has been consumed by a single question: Can Biden be convinced to drop out of the presidential race?
While it is theoretically possible for a critical mass of Democrats to jettison Biden without his cooperation, given that he is a sitting president who has secured nearly every delegate up for grabs in the primaries, that prospect is likely too ugly for the party to contemplate. So, it’s ultimately a waiting game to see if Biden will hold his ground or withdraw.
As everybody scrutinizes his appearances and devours statements from Democrats — both public and anonymous — I thought it would be an interesting exercise to look back to 1987, when Biden also faced the choice of whether to drop out of a presidential campaign and ultimately decided to do so.
There are plenty of differences between the two cases. In 1987, Biden’s campaign was just a few months old, and he was just 44 with a long career ahead of him. Now, he is a sitting president in the twilight of his career who has already secured his party’s nomination. The stakes of a president stepping down this close to an election are orders of magnitude more consequential than a candidate bailing on a primary.
But if you read through the relevant sections of What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer’s seminal work on the 1988 presidential race, and Biden’s own 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep, it’s hard to miss some parallels between the two periods — particularly the extent to which he leans on family to help him navigate tough decisions.
To offer a refresher, Biden launched his candidacy in the summer of 1987 as the relatively young, up-and-coming candidate who hoped to appeal to Baby Boomers and expected to get a boost in the primaries from the Robert Bork confirmation hearings, which he would be leading as chairman of the Judiciary Committee. But things fell apart when he started quoting lines from Welsh politician Neil Kinnock, first with attribution and then without. Further reporting found that he had also quoted lines from Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey speeches without attribution and had been reprimanded in law school for an academic paper in which he plagiarized a law-review article. He was also under fire for exaggerating his academic record and lying about marching in the civil-rights movement. The scandal spread outside the political arena, and he became the butt of jokes on the late-night shows.
As the stories mounted and with the Bork hearings under way, Biden was under heavy pressure to drop out, eventually including from his political advisers. Mark Gitenstein, his chief counsel on the Judiciary Committee, worried that if Biden were distracted by the presidential campaign, it would imperil the effort to sink the Bork nomination. “If we win Bork, it will be in spite of us,” Biden recalled Gitenstein saying. “If we lose now, it’s going to be because of us.”
As Cramer described it, in the midst of the crisis, Biden rode the train back to Wilmington with his advisers. The advisers grabbed dinner by themselves while Biden huddled with his family, and the plan was that they’d all meet back at Biden’s house to discuss how he would formally withdraw. “But when they got to Biden’s,” Cramer wrote, “there was no more plan, Joe had talked it over with the family. It looked like he was back in the race.”
Biden wrote in his memoir, “I was torn; it really came down to family. The gurus and friends could talk, but this was a family decision.”
Beau, then in college, and Hunter, then in high school, were angry and argued passionately for him to stay in the race, seeing the media portrayal of him as inaccurate. “The only thing that’s important is your honor,” a young Hunter said. “That’s what you’ve always taught us. Your honor.”
According to Cramer, a pacing Biden agonized, saying, “I’ve never been a quitter . . . never quit anything in my life.”
His mother told him it was time to get out, and he retreated into a private conversation with Jill. “Once we were alone, the question we asked was simple,” Biden wrote. “Could we save my presidential campaign and stop Bork?”
He and his closest family members were convinced that if he had the opportunity to keep campaigning and explaining himself to voters, he could get past the scandal and prove everybody wrong. Dropping out meant he was vindicating the naysayers — proving himself a plagiarist, liar, and cheater. But if crisscrossing the early primary states meant botching the Bork nomination process and getting blamed by liberals for his getting confirmed, it would be the end of his candidacy anyway. Ted Kaufman, his longtime chief of staff and eventual successor in the Senate whom Biden described as “almost family,” told him, “There’s only one way to stop the sharks and that’s pull out.” Ultimately, Biden decided to drop out — but bitterness lingered.
“Jill was on his left, close, her right arm almost touching him,” Cramer wrote of the scene at the withdrawal speech. “She stared straight ahead at the wall of cameras, the pack . . . but she met no one’s eyes. She hated them. First time in her life . . . but it was true: this was hate. It was just another story for them. They were excited: the crowd at a hanging.”
After the announcement, Biden tried to convince himself that he had done the right thing. “I can concentrate now — do the hearings,” he said, according to Cramer’s account. “At least, I can do a good job.”
“No!” Jill interjected and, “with steel in her voice,” added, “You have got to win.”
(It’s hard to read this exchange now without thinking of the recent statement that drew the ire of Democrats, in which Biden said he could be content with losing to Trump as long as he gave it his all.)
Biden himself recalled that once he returned to work as a senator after withdrawing, “I was determined to show the world I was not a quitter. No matter how long it took me, I was going to demonstrate that the mistakes that had forced me from the presidential race did not, would not, define me.”
The following February was when doctors discovered a potentially fatal aneurysm in Biden’s brain, leading to emergency surgery. He and Jill became convinced that had he not dropped out of the race, he would have died. “I would have been running across New Hampshire, from Nashua to Manchester to Concord to Bristol, when the aneurysm started to bleed,” Biden recalled. “Would I have stopped long enough for treatment? Would I have tried to push through the pain? She knew me pretty well. ‘You wouldn’t be alive,’ she told me later. ‘Things happen for a reason.’”
Going back over this experience, one can start to imagine the sorts of conversations that are happening within Biden’s family as the pressure mounts for him to drop out. There is likely resentment toward the media for the unrelenting stories trying to push him out of the race. From his public statements, it’s clear Biden is still driven by a desire to live up to the self-perception that he is most proud of: that he is not a quitter, that he may get knocked down but always gets back up, that he will keep pushing through, no matter what. Biden may still believe that if he stays in the race, he has the chance to prove he is mentally fit and force all of those naysayers who are convinced he cannot beat Donald Trump to eat crow for Thanksgiving. But if he drops out, he may be thinking, he will vindicate those who say he is mentally gone, and the final impression of his long political career would be a humiliating debate against somebody he holds in contempt — and somebody who instead of acting graciously, will only rub in the humiliation.
In 1987, he was convinced to drop out of the race by unrelenting negative coverage as well as the fear of getting blamed for a huge defeat for the Left. If he is ultimately driven out of the race now, it will likely be only if he is convinced that he cannot beat Trump — an even more alarming prospect to Democrats than the threat of Justice Bork.