Joe Biden’s public unravelling raises the question: who’s been making the big decisions?
It can’t be easy for the former senator from Delaware, former vice president and President of the United States to say goodbye. But it’s better than being remembered as the man who put the welcome mat out for Donald Trump.
It’s sad that Hunter Biden is telling his dad to stay in the top job. Watching Joe Biden try to hold on to power goes beyond politics. It’s like watching a Willy Loman hang on to “a smile and a shoeshine” all over again. Except that in The Death of a Salesman, Loman’s loser kid, Biff, tried to get his dad to face reality. Biden’s tragedy is a deeply sad and human story of an old man who doesn’t know when it’s time to hand over the keys.
A quick read of history about Margaret Thatcher or Richard Nixon might help his friends in the Democratic Party do what his family haven’t done to date: tell Joe to go, allowing someone else to have a shot at defeating Donald Trump in November.
But first, the family. As responsible adults, one of the hardest decisions we make is to convince our ageing parents that some things are beyond them. Even the gentlest conversation with a proud and ageing parent is heart-breaking. But in the end, handing over the keys is not just about them.
We do it because we love them, because their last years should not end in ignominy. As horrendous as it would have been if my mother had hurt herself in a car accident, the risk of her hurting someone else forced us to tell Mum that driving was no longer safe.
Maybe Hunter, with his history of drug addiction and recent criminal trials and convictions, is not the responsible adult to help his father realise what Americans saw last Thursday – a mentally decaying and incompetent Biden. It was a screaming reminder that Biden four years ago is different from – more competent than – Biden today. Biden in four years will be a mess.
The public unravelling of the US President raises the inevitable question of who’s been making the big decisions while he’s been in the Oval Office? And who will make them for another four years as Biden’s cognitive impairment gets even messier?
Adorning the cover of Vogue this week in a white tuxedo gown, Dr Jill Biden, in an online update of the interview, is quoted as saying, “We would not let those 90 minutes (of the debate) define the four years he’s been president”.
“We will decide our future”, the First Lady tells Vogue. “We will continue to fight.”
Why can’t his family see what the rest of us can? Her husband’s debate performance wasn’t a bad day. It wasn’t down to a cold, or medication, or as Biden said, a few trips around the world. The President has a bedroom on his jet. He had a week at Camp David to prepare for the debate after his travels. He reportedly started prep at 11am with time for afternoon naps. Nothing wrong with naps. JFK, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton took naps. One of them napped alone. None of them was mentally infirm from old age.
The June 27 debate unveiled the Teleprompted-in-Chief as an old man with serious cognitive issues. If Biden were a surgeon, I wouldn’t let him operate on me. If he were a chef, he should be kept away from sharp objects and flames. If he were my dad, I’d be taking the car keys away.
Biden thinks he’s saving American democracy from Trump. In truth, Biden staying is Trump’s best bet for taking the White House again. Biden, his pride and ego, is a big part of the problem with American democracy, with politics the world over.
Now to some political history. Many leaders before Biden, and without his cognitive decline, suffered a similar problem believing for too long that only they could save us from political disaster. The more momentous the leader, the harder it is for ego not to take over.
John Howard stayed too long. A man whose judgment was famously well-attuned to understanding the electorate – give or take a bullet proof vest in 1996 and Work Choices in 2006 – failed him in his final year. It didn’t help that the man who should have been his successor was too petulant and weak, and not nearly as popular among Liberals.
But still, the job of a great CEO – including one who runs the country – is to help set up his or her successor so that the other mob don’t wreck the country. Howard’s decision to stay delivered the nation Kevin Rudd. Some of us are still smarting from Howard’s unwelcome gift.
Thatcher was not keen on leaving, either. Kenneth Clarke was the first cabinet minister to advise her to step down after her narrow victory in the first leadership ballot round in November 1990 ensured a second ballot.
Thatcher later described Clarke in her memoir as a “candid friend”. “His manner was robust in the brutalist style he has cultivated,” she wrote.
In a BBC documentary in 2015, Clarke recalled Thatcher saying she couldn’t go yet, “there were things she had to do – there was no one else”.
One of Thatcher’s key supporters, John – now Lord – Wakeham, told the same BBC doco that he was the cabinet minister who told her to meet with other cabinet members, one by one, so they could tell her the truth, that she wouldn’t win the second ballot. “I did that out of loyalty to her, not in order to get rid of her, but in order that she could make a decision as what to do. I made her know what the situation was and she then decided what she wanted to do,” Wakeham said. Wakeham revealed that Thatcher’s husband, Denis, also played a decisive role in coaxing his wife to step down.
“ He (Denis) said, ‘You’ve done enough, old girl. You’ve done your share. For God’s sake, don’t go on any longer’.”
Britain’s first female prime minister, and its longest serving prime minister of the 20th century, stood down with her dignity and legacy intact.
Are senior and influential Democrats telling Joe Biden that he should make way for someone else for the good of the party and nation? Where are Biden’s candid friends?
Polls say that more and more undecided Americans and registered Democrats are turning away from Biden. If they skip the November ballot altogether, they won’t be ticking boxes of congressional contests either.
Apart from reading the polls, Democrats should be reading some history.
In May 1973, even after Watergate, Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP presidential nominee and respected congressional leader, told Time magazine Nixon still had support in congress. By the summer of 1974 that had changed. The Republican senator from Arizona told a Republican conference lunch on August 6 1974: “There are only so many lies you can take, and now there has been one too many. Nixon should get his ass out of the White House – today.”
As Politico’s Andrew Glass recalled in 2007, Goldwater set up a meeting the next day, telling the White House aide he was going to tell the president that many Republican senators wanted him to resign.
Nixon demanded that top GOP congressional leaders join the meeting. They did. Two days later Nixon resigned.
As Glass wrote, the timeline of Nixon’s demise, and in particular Goldwater’s role, “illustrates an adage about political life: ‘If You Strike at the King, You Have to Kill Him.’ That belief was around when Shakespeare wrote his plays about King Lear and Julius Caesar.”
Stephen Hess, who once worked in the Nixon White House, told Glass why Nixon listened.
“Richard Nixon came out of the congress. The folks who came to him and told him that he had to leave were the same folks who, in a sense, he grew up with.”
The son of a used-car salesman, Joseph Robinette Biden Junior’s long and successful public service can’t be taken from him. It can’t be easy for the former senator from Delaware, former vice-president and President of the United States to say goodbye. But it’s better than being remembered as the man who put the welcome mat out for Trump. Worse, being remembered as the decrepit symbol – along with Trump – of a once great nation in decline. Almost 300 million adult Americans, and the best they can do is another Trump v Biden contest? Trump’s not going anywhere, but it would be terrific for America – and the rest of the world – if he too retired from public life. The best chance of a forced exit for Trump is for senior Democrats to act like responsible adults.
The rise of Trump in 2016 had much to do with the failures of the Democrat establishment. A second coming of Trump will be their legacy, too.
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