Commentators urge US President Joe Biden to drop out of election race
With just months until a likely Donald Trump rematch, US President Joe Biden is on edge. Here’s what could happen next.
US President Joe Biden has two words for anyone who thinks he is too old to be president: “Watch me.”
The 81-year-old’s problem is Americans are doing just that – and they don’t like what they see. Between a stiff gait, a soft voice and a fuzzy memory, the commander-in-chief doesn’t always appear to be in command.
This is why the overwhelming majority of voters do not think the oldest president in history should seek a second term. And yet, with months until a likely rematch with Donald Trump, no serious Democrat has challenged Biden’s candidacy or even suggested someone should.
Is there time to change horses? Yes, in a word, although only if Biden agrees to step aside. Which makes this the more pertinent question: how did he find himself in this predicament?
Biden always dreamt of the presidency, even writing a paper about his ambition as a seven-year-old, but he had to overcome nightmarish hurdles to achieve it. That journey explains his determination to, in his words, “finish the job”.
There was the debilitating speech impediment as a child. The death of his wife and daughter in a car accident, weeks after he became one of the youngest US senators in history. The plagiarism scandal that cruelled his first White House run, and then two brain aneurisms that nearly killed him in the months after that.
By 2008, when Barack Obama anointed Biden as his Vice President, it seemed like the final act of his career. The 65-year-old’s folksy charm that had propelled him to that point was more exaggerated than ever, so much so that the press began tracking his “Bidenisms”.
He called Obama “Barack America”, told a wheelchair-bound politician to “stand up” before a crowd, and talked about recently eating at a restaurant that closed a decade before.
Biden’s recent gaffes are eerily similar. But rather than being “followed by a self-deprecating joke”, as Slate reported at the time, they are now more likely matched by a blank stare.
Any thoughts of Biden replacing Obama in 2016 were scotched by the death of his son, his boss’s preference for Hillary Clinton, and the conventional wisdom that he was too old.
Nevertheless, as a prescient profile reported, Biden was “a comeback addict”.
“Biden simply isn’t ready to quit,” Politico said in 2014. “It’s not clear he even knows how.”
A decade later, nearing the end of a presidential term that long seemed beyond him, Biden is defiantly staring down his doubters once again.
But stubbornness alone will not overcome the concerns about his age, not after the special counsel probing his handling of classified documents decided not to lay charges because a jury would see Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.
That brutal line, in a report issued this month, has reignited the issue and prompted influential Biden-friendly commentators to urge him to drop out of the election race.
Tellingly, no senior Democrats have challenged him, other than a little-known congressman’s quixotic campaign. Hypothetical candidates like California Governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have instead become high-profile Biden boosters.
The White House argues the age debate ignores his record, including his leadership in wars in Ukraine and Israel, historic investments in infrastructure, clean energy and manufacturing, and the prevention of a recession that experts deemed inevitable.
“I know what the hell I’m doing,” Biden angrily declared.
But his poll numbers remain poor in an expected contest against the 77-year-old Trump, who tried to overturn his loss to Biden in 2020 and is now facing 91 criminal charges.
“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” the President admitted in December.
His predecessor’s re-election campaign is certainly motivating his own, which he announced last April after months of talks with his wife Jill, his closest advisor.
Famously, when Democratic strategists tried to convince Biden to run in 2003, a bikini-clad Jill wrote “No” on her stomach and walked through their meeting.
“Needless to say, they got the message,” she wrote in her memoir.
Now, the First Lady wants four more years. As she said after the special counsel’s report: “Joe is 81, that’s true, but he’s 81 doing more in an hour than most people do in a day.”
But what if the Bidens changed their minds? It is too late for anyone else to enter the primary campaign, meaning the party’s candidate would have to be decided at its convention in August in Chicago, where delegates pledged to the President could switch to someone else.
This last happened in 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson stepped down after one term. His Vice President Hubert Humphrey prevailed at the convention – also held in Chicago – and then lost to Richard Nixon.
As for Biden’s Vice President Kamala Harris, she recently declared: “I am ready to serve.”
But University of Kentucky elections expert Bridgett King says there is no guarantee Harris – whose approval rating is as dismal as Biden’s – would be chosen. Instead, King suggests a “messy political battle” would unfold, with other top Democrats allowed to jump in.
Obama’s speechwriter Jon Favreau, who acknowledges Biden “looks and sounds so much older than when he ran in 2020”, nevertheless says there is a “huge risk” if he drops out. He says the “real stars” within the party lack Biden’s profile and poll even worse against Trump.
“What Biden can do is take concerns about his age seriously, acknowledge that fears about his performance aren’t media creations or Democratic bed-wetting, and focus single-mindedly on crisp, strong, energetic appearances,” Favreau says.
Biden rarely holds press conferences or gives interviews, even turning down the traditional pre-Super Bowl appearance. His staff prefer non-political podcasts and social media videos, limiting him from the scrutiny he will have to confront if he is to overcome voters’ concerns.
Next month’s State of the Union speech looms as his next best chance to reset, especially if he can replicate last year’s punchy showing against congressional Republican hecklers.
“Everybody wants to and needs to see more of that fiery President Biden,” his former press secretary Jen Psaki says, arguing his campaign’s “biggest problem” is too many Americans “believe that Joe Biden is not going to be the nominee”.
“He is going to be the nominee,” she said.
Perhaps she has heard one of Biden’s favourite retorts to those suggesting he slow down, a famous line from poet Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
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