Democrats are hoping that the fates will intervene and rescue them from having to exercise agency and display courage.
It’s now day 14 of the Democratic Party’s internal crisis over Joe Biden’s political viability, and the party continues to languish in a purgatorial malaise. The Biden death-watch news cycle that has consumed the press shows no signs of abating. Indeed, Democrats are fueling it as each of the party’s federal lawmakers weigh in semi-hourly with their individual thoughts on what the president’s fate should be. The Democratic Party’s perdition has become so unbearable that some of its members are now talking themselves into the notion that it would be better if their party’s incumbent president had a meltdown so undeniable that it might shake up this dynamic.
“Longtime party loyalists said they were now reduced to hoping for another major public misstep by Mr. Biden, such as a serious stumble at his NATO news conference, to either persuade reticent members of Congress to speak out or to convince the president that he should leave the race on his own,” the New York Times reported on Tuesday. The rationalizations that would lead partisan Democrats to conclude that their party might actually benefit from the president’s implosion are, let’s just say, complex. But this wasn’t merely an errant thought from one beleaguered Democrat in the throes of the bargaining stage of grief. This sentiment is becoming more widespread.
“This is a terrible thing to say,” one unnamed “White House official” told the Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich after reportedly confessing that more “face-plants” by Biden might break the stalemate within the Democratic coalition over the president’s future. “But that might be the only thing that could force him out at this point, while there’s still time to rewrite the ending.”
That outlook is apparently shared by some Democratic lawmakers in Washington, according to Axios. “I told my comms team, have our statement ready to go next time he has a big f***-up, because you know there’s going to be another one,” an unnamed House Democrat said. The quote’s source maintained that “you might see a whole new wave” of Democratic defections if the former president experiences another “debacle” like the one that took place on the debate stage.
Sure, you might. But what if Biden doesn’t spontaneously combust? What if he has a middling performance in Thursday’s press conference at the NATO summit — neither good nor disastrous — that fails to break the internal Democratic logjam? Will the party convince itself that Biden will have a chance to redeem himself in the president’s Monday interview with NBC News host Lester Holt? Will that be the next “make-or-break” moment for the president, until the next one and the one after that, all the way until the party’s nominating convention has mooted the point of this exercise?
Democrats are hoping that the fates will intervene and rescue them from having to exercise agency and display courage. Their appeals to chance are unlikely to be rewarded. Biden isn’t going to save them from this predicament, either by suddenly discovering an adroitness he’s previously lacked or by succumbing to a public episode that renders him categorically disqualified from the office he seeks to retain. They’ll have to save themselves. Right now, Democrats don’t seem to be inclined toward heroics.