There’s No Coming Back from This

T o call it “damage control” cheapens the multidirectional disaster-mitigation campaign in which Biden’s team is now engaged. The president’s camp is throwing haymakers at anyone on their side who is imprudent enough to be honest about the president’s condition and his dimming political prospects in November. But for all their denunciations of the “bedwetters” in their midst, the last 72 hours cannot be undone. Even if Democrats manage to rationalize themselves into accepting Biden’s renomination to the White House, the incumbent has been done in by his allies’ candor.

The New York Times editorial board led the way last Friday afternoon. For Biden to run for reelection now risks “the stability and security of the country” by “forcing voters to choose” between Trump’s “deficiencies” and Biden’s. The president’s “age and infirmity” have been laid bare (notwithstanding the paper’s best efforts to disguise them by accusing those who noticed his frailties of misinforming their audiences). The party needs to find someone “more capable” to serve in the White House.

The editorial was swiftly followed by similarly panicked calls from left-leaning outfits for a deliverance from Joe Biden’s candidacy. “This wasn’t a bad night,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution declared. “It was confirmation of the worst fears of some of Biden’s most ardent supporters” that “age has finally caught up” with the president. The “mental and physical rigors” of the presidency preclude another four-year term for Biden, and that fact has become an insurmountable obstacle before his reelection. “The shade of retirement is now necessary for President Biden,” the paper’s editorial board concluded.

“Thursday’s debate was designed to answer the question of whether Mr. Biden was fit to be president — and in this it succeeded,” the Economist’s editors determined. He is “befuddled and incoherent — too infirm, frankly, to cope with another four years in the world’s hardest job.” For Biden to stay the course would be an act of “national endangerment,” the New Yorker’s David Remnick wrote. Onetime CNN correspondent Chris Cillizza shared an unsolicited text he received from a Democratic operative and a delegate to the upcoming Democratic National Convention, which crystalizes the conundrum facing Democrats of good conscience. “I know I’m pledged to him, but how the f*** can I vote for Biden?” the unnamed delegate asked. “How can I do that to my country?”

How, indeed.

And yet, when the shock of the president’s cataclysmic debate performance has worn off and the demands associated with tribal affinities reassert themselves, it is a safe bet that these and other nervous Democratic partisans will find a way to rally around the head of their party. Even if Biden lacks the vigor necessary to corral his party’s more restive elements, the threat they see in Donald Trump’s restoration to the presidency will do that work for him. There is, however, no going back to the pre-debate status quo — not for the outlets and columnists who put their reputations on the line.

It’s not hard to imagine the conditions that might prevail in the fall that would compel the pundits, editorial boards, and weak-kneed politicians to take it all back. With sorrow and disappointment, they will attempt to rally the troops against a man they will insist Americans cannot trust with the presidency. But they will be making that case in service to a figure they have already implied cannot be trusted to operate heavy machinery, much less serve in the Oval Office. Do they expect that their own verdicts will be stricken from the record, that Republicans will not throw their own words back in their faces?

The calls for Biden to surrender his party’s nomination clearly signal that he cannot serve in the presidency for another four years; taken to their logical conclusion, they also mean that the president cannot serve out the six months left in his first term. Republican politicians and ad-makers will not let the voting public forget it.

The Democrats are right to fear the chaos that would be unleashed if Biden were to abandon his party to its fate at this late date. The most likely result would be to convince persuadable voters that the president’s party is too disorderly to be rewarded with power. But Democrats delude themselves if they think that voters are not already witnessing a party in crisis.

Today, the Biden family is attacking the president’s own staffers, alleging that he was over-coached and “not well-rested.” Those staffers are, in turn, throwing the president under the bus:

The most influential outlets in the Democratic firmament are calling on the president to step aside, and the president’s loyalists have responded to those nudges by indulging in their barely repressed contempt for those outlets.

This is chaos, but it’s not the forgivable sort. The chaos we’re witnessing now has accompanied a flailing effort to preserve a set of circumstances voters find intolerable. But whatever confusion follows the struggle to oust Biden from the nomination, at least Democrats will be trying to get right with the majority of voters, who think it’s time for Biden to be set out to pasture.

Even if Democrats invent some new mechanism in order to rid themselves of their elected presidential nominee, there’s no going back to last week. The jig is up. Democratic partisans have written the president’s political epitaph. Biden’s allies cannot retract their noble (if imprudent) honesty. The longer it takes Democrats to recognize that there’s no coming back from this, the longer it will take them to repair the damage wrought by Biden’s vise grip on power.