On the menu today: The American people don’t deserve to be in this mess. When they elected Joe Biden in 2020 — after Biden pledged, “I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else” — they assumed that Joe, Jill, and everyone around them recognized the difficulty of the job, the supreme responsibilities it entails, and the importance of America’s commander in chief possessing a sound mind, reliable memory, and keen judgment. And now, with its joyous era of free travel, state dinners, Vogue covers, and potential pardons at risk, the Biden family is attempting the desperate stratagem of just battening down the hatches, betting that Democrats will lack the nerve to remove the president, and just waiting out the storm. This is the Ralph Northam strategy. It’s a spectacularly selfish, reckless, risky, destructive, and legacy-ruining tactic: effectively declaring that the Bidens will only leave office kicking and screaming, their fingernails digging into the carpet of the Oval Office as they’re dragged out.
A Legacy-Ruining Approach
“When [Dick] Morris reported that Americans would favor his impeachment or resignation if he lied under oath, he says Bill Clinton replied: ‘Well, we’ll just have to win, then.’”
Every now and then, some elected official gets caught in a serious scandal and then attempts to just wait out the storm. Sometimes they hang on because enough time passes between the revelation and their next election; sometimes they hang on because their state or district strongly prefers one party over the other; and often they survive because they’re incumbents who have been around forever, know where all the bodies are buried, and bring home the bacon. Think of Ted Kennedy, John Murtha, Barney Frank, David Vitter, or Charlie Rangel. Idaho GOP senator Larry Craig rescinded his resignation and finished out his term.
And in my home state, we had the egregious embarrassment of former governor Ralph Northam. As I wrote at the end of Northam’s term:
It’s no big mystery how Northam remained in office. If Northam had resigned or the state legislature removed him from office, the lieutenant governor would take over – and the lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, was facing two serious accusations of sexual assault. (The Virginia House Democratic Caucus argued that “the allegations against Lieutenant Governor Fairfax are extremely serious,” and also that the state legislature should not investigate the allegations.) If Northam and Fairfax resigned, then state attorney general Mark Herring would be governor — and Herring admitted he had worn blackface to a college party in 1980.
If Northam, Fairfax, and Herring had all resigned simultaneously, then the speaker of the House of Delegates at that time — Republican Kirk Cox — would become governor. And Virginia Democrats believed that a Republican governor was much worse than blackface, wearing a Klan hood, or allegations of past sexual assault.
We are witnessing the Biden inner-circle attempt the Ralph Northam maneuver. Sure, the president had an abysmal debate, didn’t do a sit-down on-camera interview until a week later, and his staff is telling radio interviewers what questions to ask. But Biden has all the delegates he needs to stay the party’s nominee in 2024, and it’s exceptionally difficult to remove a president who doesn’t want to leave office. Eric Felten contended in the Wall Street Journal last week that the current circumstances are proving that the 25th Amendment “is practically useless when a president is incapacitated and won’t admit it. . . . Cabinet secretaries are chosen by the president and serve at his pleasure. What politician is going to kick to the curb the man who gave him his high office?”
The Biden family and its closest aides are betting that frustrated or panicking Democrats will flinch once they realize how difficult it will be to remove him as the nominee or as president.
Biden confidantes, having seen Joe hang on just well enough to stay in the race against Donald Trump, are talking themselves into believing that rerunning the “basement campaign” from 2020 will do just well enough to reach 270 electoral votes. If the “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin holds, Biden likely hangs on. (Note that surveys showing Biden ahead in Pennsylvania are few and far between.)
And if Biden hangs on for another term, everyone in the family keeps their status and influence, and Hunter gets the pardon that the president promised he would not deliver.
The alternative is that Biden resigns office or chooses to not be his party’s nominee, which would a de facto admission of guilt. It would confirm the widespread suspicions that everyone in Biden’s inner circle is an Edith Wilson — secretly enjoying the powers of the presidency as an incapacitated, barely functioning man waves to the crowd as a figurehead.
Recent days have brought reports of senior staffers making decisions for the president without consulting him. Axios reports Biden “is staffed so closely that he’s lost all independence. POTUS relies on staff to nudge him with reminders of who he’s meeting, including former staffers and advisers who Biden should easily remember without a reminder from [Deputy Chief of Staff Annie] Tomasini.” Axios separately reported that, “For his events, Biden’s staffers prepare a short document with large print and photos that include his precise path to a podium. . . . The staffer who helped with the fundraiser told Axios: ‘It surprised me that a seasoned political pro like the president would need detailed verbal and visual instructions on how to enter and exit a room.’”
If these reports are accurate — and there’s little reason to doubt them — Joe Biden is already not the president.
Even more bizarrely, the New York Times quoted an unnamed senior White House official who thinks Biden should not seek another term:
One senior White House official, however, who has worked with Mr. Biden during his presidency, vice presidency and 2020 campaign, said in an interview on Saturday morning that Mr. Biden should not seek re-election.
After watching Mr. Biden in private, in public and while traveling with him, the official said they no longer believed the president had what it took to campaign in a vigorous way and defeat Donald J. Trump. The official, who insisted on anonymity in order to continue serving, said Mr. Biden had steadily showed more signs of his age in recent months, including speaking more slowly, haltingly and quietly, as well as appearing more fatigued in private.
It’s like a horror movie: “The calls to step down are coming from inside the [White] house!”
Hmm, who’s worked with Biden when he was vice president, when he was a candidate in 2020, and since he’s become president, and who travels with him now? That’s a short list of suspects.
The Democrats are trapped in a self-destructive cycle: Biden has a bad public event; lots of Democrats publicly acknowledge the obvious that he shouldn’t be the nominee or be president; Biden’s team and the president offer what David Axelrod sums up as “denial, delusion, defiance”; and the party begrudgingly accepts that Biden isn’t going anywhere — until Biden’s next bad public event, starting the cycle all over again.
One problem with the Biden family attempting the Northam survival strategy is that the president doesn’t have the “advantages” that Northam did. One glaring difference is that Northam never had to face the voters again, because Virginia limits its governors to one term. The post-mortems of Northam’s term spun him as a reformed progressive crusader who had earned forgiveness from Virginia’s African Americans, but you notice no one in Virginia wanted to see Northam run for office again, and Northam has said he’ll never run for public office again.
Biden turned in that catastrophic debate performance a bit more than three months before Election Day and 55 days before voters in a handful of states cast early ballots. There’s not enough time to change people’s minds about what they saw and heard from the president. Biden’s job approval in the FiveThirtyEight average is right around 37 percent. That’s not likely to change much between now and Election Day.
Biden’s response to this is to contend that every pollster is wrong:
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: That’s not unusual in some states. I carried an awful lotta Democrats last time I ran in 2020. Look, I remember them tellin’ me the same thing in 2020. “I can’t win. The polls show I can’t win.” Remember 2024 — 2020, the red wave was coming.
Biden is again misremembering. As Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics noted, “Of the 229 national polls taken in 2020, Biden led in 227. He had a 5-10 point lead in the RCP [average] all year.”
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I think it’s in — all the pollsters I talk to tell me it’s a tossup. It’s a tossup. And when I’m behind, there’s only one poll I’m really far behind, CBS Poll and NBC, I mean, excuse me. And — uh—
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: New York — New York Times and NBC both have — have you about six points behind in the popular vote.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: That’s exactly right. New York Times had me behind before, anything having to do with this race — had me hind — behind ten points. Ten points they had me behind. Nothing’s changed substantially since the debate in the New York Times poll.
Everything Biden said there is completely wrong. The latest New York Times poll showed Trump’s lead expanding from three points to six points among likely voters. (A six-point margin in the national popular vote for a Republican would likely result in an Electoral College landside.) The New York Times poll has never shown Biden down by ten percentage points; Biden may be thinking of a Washington Post/ABC News poll from September 2023 that had Trump ahead, 52 percent to 42 percent, among registered voters.
ADDENDUM: Thanks to Robert, who offered this review of Dueling Six Demons on July 4:
I have read the entire Dangerous Clique series (so far). I’ve enjoyed every book. “Dueling Six Demons” is no exception. The novel takes the reader from northern Virginia and Washington, D.C. to Moldova, then Argentina, then to Taiwan, and back to Washington. In the midst of the action, the amusing banter, and the exotic locales, Geraghty explores weighty issues. One of them is the source of the genuine evil we see in the world, evil that has always been with us. Another is how we should view our own country. Geraghty acknowledges that our leaders are, and have been, flawed, but maintains that whatever we might think of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, or anyone else, our country is fundamentally good, a place where our people and their families may live and prosper. It’s a nice thing to contemplate on Independence Day.