As panic rises among Democrats about the continued viability of President Joe Biden’s candidacy after his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump last week, some in the party have resorted to creative stories to keep their spirits up.
According to a Wall Street Journal report this week, some wealthy and influential donors to the presidential campaign have used a Star Wars analogy to make the faltering case for their man. The president, they acknowledge, is definitely old and not as sharp as he was. But like the ancient Yoda in the George Lucas saga, he is fundamentally a good man, a fount of wisdom, an agent of the Force. His opponent in this telling is Jabba the Hutt, the morbidly obese crime lord, avatar of corruption and greed.
Yoda lived to be 900, according to the legend, and Joe Biden is only 81, so there’s lots of upside in this analogy. But the invocation of Jedi mythology is either a signal of an impressive faith in the ultimate success of the Democrats’ cause or a sign of how completely divorced from reality the Biden campaign team has become. I’ll let you be the judge.
Others are not relying on fictional morality tales for comfort. This Fourth of July weekend, Washington is in rebellious tumult. Elected Democrats with more at stake than a few million dollars are starting to vote with their feet. So far only two members of Congress have called directly for Biden to step aside. But ominously for the president, there are indications of a wider revolt. Various news organisations have reported that dozens of members of Congress have been circulating a draft letter calling for the president’s replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Seth Moulton, one of the most talented and upwardly mobile of House Democrats, came closest to opening the floodgates when he said on Wednesday he had “grave concerns” about Biden’s ability to defeat Trump. “When your current strategy isn’t working it’s rarely the right decision to double down. President Biden is not going to get younger.” Moulton left the narrowest crack open for a Biden salvation, saying the president needed to demonstrate he could still make a winning case. It’s this slimmest of openings the Biden team is hoping to squeeze their man through in the critical days ahead. On Wednesday the president told campaign officials: “I am running. I am the leader of the Democratic Party. No one is pushing me out.”
Today (Saturday morning AEST) the Save Biden campaign kicks into gear with a full-length interview designed to counter the impression of a frail, confused old man left by the debate. But the choice of interviewer – George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, who worked as an adviser to Bill Clinton and has all but abandoned any pretence of honest objectivity in his “journalism” – won’t help make the case that Biden is robust enough to face all comers.
The president can’t be forced out. This is not a parliamentary system where he is ultimately answerable to his party majority in the legislature. He is directly elected, has already won the primary contest for the party’s nomination and can, if he so chooses, tell his rising chorus of critics where they can put their “grave concerns”.
But constitutional rigidity can always bend to the more flexible reality of politics. And the political reality for the Democrats is as grim as it has been.
For a year or more the polls have been stable, with Trump enjoying the slenderest of leads in the national vote, but a slightly larger and more robust lead in the critical half-dozen swing states where the election will be decided. Post-debate, state-level polling won’t be known for a few more days but the national picture has deteriorated for Biden. Polls in both the Journal and the New York Times this week put Trump’s national lead at 6 per cent. If the pattern holds in those swing states, his lead there would be high single digits or even double digits. In a contest in which almost nothing has moved the needle for months, this would be close to conclusive.
The particular problem for the Democrats is that it’s hard to see how this gets better. The entire Biden campaign, beset as it already was by voter disapproval of his record in office, was based on making this election about Trump. The message to be hammered home between the summer and voting day in November was that a convicted felon who tried to overturn an election result could not be voted back into the White House.
They have tried to use this week’s Supreme Court ruling that Trump has some criminal immunity for his acts as president to amplify the scare story, claiming that it will give a future President Trump carte blanche to rule like a tyrant. (It doesn’t do anything of the sort. The court merely found a president must enjoy some immunity from being prosecuted for official acts – the exact amount to be determined by lower courts – or he would be impossibly constrained in his decision making. It did not suggest he could take out his political opponents.)
The Democrats are trapped. They know as it stands Biden cannot win. But opening up the race now would be messy, impractical and might produce an outcome that is no better. The simpler solution some favour is for Biden to step aside and anoint his vice president, Kamala Harris, as candidate. But if you’ll forgive more torturing of the Star Wars analogy, Harris, a hard-left progressive whose own campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020 was a catastrophe and who as vice president has become memorable for moments of prolix, cliche-ridden incomprehensibility, is no Princess Leia.
But Yoda is close to done; can they find a Luke Skywalker?
The Times
More Coverage
Join the conversation
Why Israel can’t seem to kill Hamas’s ‘last man standing’
Yahya Sinwar was saved in prison by an Israeli dentist who opposed the dangerous radical’s release. How has he avoided the fate of his fellow jihadists?
Read more
Small changes to make your meals more nutritious
From adding chickpeas to your meals to microwaving your veg, these expert tips will boost your health.
Read more