A longtime aficionado of the automobile, Joe Biden, the president of the United States, is looking for the exit ramp from a long and illustrious political career. Ignore the bleating of the White House leadership who insist he’s Hanging Tough and Locked In and staying in the presidential race. Ignore the Biden ride-or-die chorus on X and everywhere else in social. Despite the comparative success of the Biden interview with George Stephanopoulos on Friday on ABC News, it was, and was largely seen as, a holding-serve performance that won’t change the underlying narrative of a campaign in, or damn close to, complete disarray. The thing is done. What remains is how best to make this exit a dignified climbdown, instead of a free-fall. It is deeply regrettable, but it is certainly navigable, and it is only a matter of time until it happens.
If you want proof of this, forget the Friday interview. Look no further than the astonishing statement he made to a group of Democratic governors who spoke with him on a Wednesday call, to allay their concerns about his health and his prospects for the race to come. Imagine their surprise when he told them that, in the future, he plans to shorten his workday and avoid public events after 8 p.m. in order to get more sleep — to have a schedule more like that of an everyday citizen, an office worker or a WFH contractor. A schedule, in short, completely unlike that of a fully engaged, 24/7 president of the United States.
No White House press release or prime-time interview or statement announcing plans to Stay the Course can blunt the power of a president’s stated intention, less a concession to the office than to what the office demands: In his own words, Joe Biden plans to get a lot closer to living like a civilian. It’s not so much an operational objective as it is a fondest wish, and Joe Biden knows it.
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So we can probably expect to hear some major announcement from the White House by the middle of next week. But the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) has already hedged its bets on where things may be going. In a July 2 poll of previous Democratic contributors, the committee asked: “Are you DEFINITELY opposing Trump?” Language like that — besides anonymizing the party standard-bearer, and humanizing his opponent Donald Trump, the former transactional hysteric asterisk of a 45th president — leaves the door open for parlor games and pondering, a lot and out loud: Who’ll step up?
In the first 48 hours after the debate, and certainly since then, the media and the Xosphere have furiously placed bets on the names of prospective Democratic replacements for Biden at the top of the ticket. Whitmire. Newsom. Pritzker. Buttigieg. Shapiro. The White House appears to be expending less and less energy on full-throated rejections of the idea of any ticket but the one we have today. But given the Richter-scale events of the last week, what’s more likely going on in the White House right now is, a beleaguered brain trust is deciding how to condition the public to that which is perfectly obvious:
By any and every metric that matters — institutional, strategic, logistical, social, economic, generational — the only unknown is the person picked to be the running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris.
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Count the ways:
(1) Harris is a known quantity in Washington. As the vice president, Harris is the direct beneficiary of the logic and the law of the line of succession. This is what the vice presidency was created for: If the boss can’t go, you go. Never mind the official pecking order; as someone who’s been Biden’s veep for almost four years, Harris has a role as the heir apparent that just makes a basic, foundational sense. As vice president, she’s already been fully vetted for national office, and party leaders are ready to fall her way. South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, a Democratic power broker who almost single-handedly pulled Biden’s 2020 campaign off the respirator, has said he’ll back Harris if Biden drops out. That’s one benefit of being a known quantity: You acquire institutional clout that’s hard to ignore.
(2) If Biden withdraws, Harris as the Democratic nominee would have a lock on accessing the Biden-Harris campaign war chest and infrastructure, the vast liquid resources of cash and staff that grease the wheels of an effective campaign. As an outsider, money makes a White House bid not just possible but viable. As an incumbent, those same resources and the currency of the office make a re-election effort not just viable, but formidable.
(3) Unlike any other prospect for the top spot in the ticket, Harris would also enjoy the benefit of Biden’s deep institutional knowledge, and his decadses of connections on Capitol Hill. Having worked with him as vice president for almost four years, there’s hopefully a resilient bond there already, a common understanding between them that no outsider could hope to catch up to.
(4) Harris will help return black voters to the Democratic fold (to the extent that they ever really left in the first place). Harris has long enjoyed a bedrock of support from African American voters; vaulting to the top of the ticket would be interpreted as validation of the importance of African Americans as a constituency, and of the black vote as a party force multiplier, one that Trump and the Republicans can’t touch. And count on it: someone named Barack Obama would certainly lean in to help Harris and Democrats up and down the ticket. That combination would go a long way to restoring black voter enthusiasm, and, almost certainly boost black voter turnout.
(5) Harris immediately rewrites the 2024 campaign’s geriatric-narrative arithmetic, and weaponizes the age-performance issue in the Democrats’ favor. Republicans have tried long and hard to turn the three-year difference between Biden’s age and Trump’s age into a chasm. The nearly 20-year difference between Harris’ age (59) and Trump’s age (78) more convincingly puts the Trump campaign on its generational heels, in an instant. That almost-generational span is a strong beginning for a forward-looking political party that’s hoping — eager — to remake an old identity and put the past behind it. That’s thinking, and a message, younger voters could get their hearts around.
(6) For much of the two years since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, Harris has been the tip of the White House spear on abortion and reproductive rights. Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket in 2024 would galvanize those voters most sensitive to those matters — no less than half the electorate. There’s every good reason to believe that, with Republican-leaning judges and legislatures doing all they can to curtail reproductive options, women voters are poised to make a difference — maybe the difference — in the outcome of the 2024 race. Casting a vote for Harris to be president of the United States would be a transformational act in and of itself.
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Since the debate, Biden supporters on XTwitter have taken an increasingly angry, rock-hard line in Biden’s defense, but they’ve been losing ground. Those who’ve made Joe Biden the hill they’ll die on are starting to confront a truth as inescapable for Biden as it is for Donald Trump: One man doesn’t embody either party, despite being their leaders. Neither party can thrive or fall apart, live or die, on the fortunes of one person. Democrats are about to learn reluctantly what the Republicans refuse to learn at all.
The slaves to the conventional metrics, reflexive polls, and the punditburo will pull their chins and lament Harris’ chances for victory. But compare those naysayers to the ones from the world of almost 250 years ago, the ones who said this plucky new little nation — something called the United States of America — had no chance to survive and equal or surpass the empires of Europe, or economically compete with the rest of the world.
These are not conventional times. What Kamala Harris as the Democratic standard-bearer will tell the nation (and her Republican rival) in 2024 is the same thing that plucky little nation told the world in 1776: Never, never underestimate the power of the shock of the new.