Democrats Should Have Sidelined Joe Biden in 2024. The Reason Why Speaks to a More Dire Political Sin.
PLUS: I review my own coverage of the Biden age issue.
Former President Joe Biden was in the news a lot last week. The nation was saddened to learn he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. The disease has spread to his bones, which means it is now incurable, but because it is hormone-sensitive, it potentially can be managed.
News of Biden’s diagnosis landed a few days before the release of Original Sin, a book by Jake Tapper (CNN) and Alex Thompson (Axios) detailing how Biden and his inner circle refused to reckon with the president’s cognitive and physical decline as they embarked on his 2024 re-election campaign. That act of denial (the authors call it a “cover-up,” but that suggests an effort to conceal something that was happening out in the open) culminated in Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June 2024.
I have not read the book, but news organizations have reported extensively on its contents, so its main ideas are part of the public record. There’s actually not much in the book the public doesn’t already know or suspect. Its most damning sections are behind-the-scenes accounts of how Biden’s aides limited the president’s exposure to the public and other government officials, stage-managed events, and shot down claims Biden was slipping. Its juiciest sections are people’s firsthand accounts of interacting with a shockingly enfeebled president. The key takeaways:
Tapper and Thompson trace the beginning of Biden’s decline back to 2015 following the death of his son Beau. Even after allowing for his stutter and his tendency to commit gaffes, Biden was already showing signs of slippage during the 2020 campaign, which I would argue is why he fared so poorly in that year’s Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries, contests that require up-close-and-personal interactions with voters. Still, most who met with Biden in that time and during the first two years of his presidency felt he was still mentally engaged with the job and that the slippage they saw—forgetting names, fumbling for words, an unsteady walk—was part of the ordinary process of aging. Their worries amounted to concern, not alarm. That changed sometime in 2023 (Tapper and Thompson’s sources trace it to the collapse of his son Hunter’s plea deal) when Biden’s condition worsened and he regularly appeared confused and exhausted.
Biden’s closest aides—including First Lady Jill Biden—went to great lengths to insulate him. They reduced the number of people who interacted with him, curtailed his workday significantly, shortened his speeches, and simplified his speeches’ vocabulary. Biden’s dress shoes were swapped out for sneakers, and he began using the rear entrance of Air Force One so he had fewer stairs to climb. Some aides speculated he would need to use a wheelchair in his second term. Convinced the only person who could defeat Trump was Biden, aides aggressively attacked journalists and Democratic politicians who challenged Biden’s acuity. They also withheld critical information about Biden’s approval rating and his standing in the race from Biden himself.
Biden’s closest aides frequently told others they lacked confidence in Vice President Kamala Harris. This was done to suggest that a Harris candidacy—resulting either from a primary contest she would have been favored to win owing to her status as vice president or by switching Biden out for her—would diminish Democrats’ chances in 2024. Yet many Democrats, including Barack Obama, had already reached the same conclusion about Harris.
The closer people were to Biden, the more likely they were to deny Biden’s condition. This obviously applied to his aides, but Democratic politicians and officials were also reluctant to voice their concerns out of concern they would only end up damaging Biden’s re-election prospects. Party officials and donors often wondered why the president was kept at arm’s length yet still trusted those who insisted everything was fine. Meanwhile, the American people had concluded as early as 2021 that Biden was too old to serve another term as president.
Tapper and Thompson argue all this was an act of major political malpractice. Biden and his aides should have put aside their desire for power and announced earlier rather than later in his term that he would not run for re-election. His inner circle had a responsibility to tell Biden the truth about his condition and urge him to step aside, and Democratic leadership, knowing the stakes of the election, should have intervened if he refused. But one of the major implications of Tapper and Thompson’s book isn’t that Biden should have stood down earlier in his term or that Democratic leadership should have pushed him out of the race or that, given his age, Biden should have picked someone he had greater confidence in to serve as vice president; it’s that Biden’s original sin was believing in 2019 that he was fit to serve as president.
Following Biden’s catastrophic debate last summer, I argued Democrats needed to dump Biden if they hoped to maintain their credibility as the (as opposed to a, which might imply there is more than one) responsible major national political party. What Democrats are realizing after the publication of Tapper and Thompson’s book is that in the months and years preceding that debate, Biden’s physical and cognitive performance as president, his insistence on running for re-election, the party’s refusal to sideline him and find a better candidate, and Democrats’ denial that Biden’s condition was a problem despite public evidence to the contrary had already convinced many Americans the Democratic Party was not a responsible political party.
Along those same lines, I argued Democrats needed to move on from Biden if they hoped to convince Americans a vote for Democrats was a vote for democracy, as few voters would be convinced democracy was really on the line in that election if Democrats couldn’t find anyone better than a failing octogenarian to lead the charge. But again, what Democrats are realizing now is that voters had tuned that plea out months earlier because the party had stood by Biden for so long. In sum, Democrats had already sustained serious reputational damage by the time Biden stepped stiffly onto that debate stage.
The question then is why Democrats didn’t intervene earlier to compel Biden to stand down. Again, I haven’t read Tapper and Thompson’s book to know if they explore this issue, but it’s easy knowing the outcome of the June debate and last November’s election to jump to the conclusion that Democrats made a terrible mistake by not pushing Biden out of the race before primary season was in full swing. But I don’t think the political calculations were as clear-cut in the moment as they now seem.
First of all, with Trump in the race and American democracy on the line, the stakes of the 2024 election were very high. That’s actually a very strong argument for replacing a weak candidate, but it’s also a strong argument for not plunging the pro-democracy party into a debate about the qualifications of an incumbent president who may refuse to step aside or ultimately survive an attempt to depose him. That sort of a debate has the potential to cripple a party as it heads into a general election. Consider: The last three incumbent presidents who faced serious primary challengers (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush) all lost re-election. Maybe they faced those challengers because they were politically vulnerable presidents to begin with, but they certainly didn’t emerge from those contests in a stronger position. When you factor in the advantages incumbent presidents typically have when running for re-election, Democrats concluded that so long as they weren’t sure they could knock Biden out of the race, they would be better off bolstering Biden rather than wounding him by raising the saliency of the fitness issue.
We also overlook how strongly positioned Biden was to actually win re-election. It seems crazy to say that now, especially knowing how voters held Biden responsible for inflation, but on paper at least, conditions were pretty good. Inflation had come down, unemployment remained low, and GDP was high. Biden could campaign on a number of significant legislative achievements. Democrats fared better than expected in the 2022 and 2023 elections. Biden certainly was vulnerable on a number of issues—inflation, Afghanistan, immigration—but every incumbent president is. Those issues may have sunk Biden, or he may have been able to overcome them.
But to overcome that, of course, Democrats would have needed a candidate who could have vigorously and coherently made the case for his achievements and taken the fight to Trump. Biden was not up for that. Maybe Americans would have overlooked Biden’s age and excused a Rose Garden campaign if they felt great about the economy, but they didn’t, so Biden would have needed to hit the campaign trail hard. His closest advisors and Democratic Party leadership should have acknowledged that and done everything in their power to stage an intervention and convince him not to run for re-election. They bear responsibility—maybe even more so than Biden, if we believe his own judgment was compromised—for failing to put the party in a better position to defend this country from Trump.
There are two other key principles here that need to be mentioned. First, shadow administrations are not democratic. The buck stops with the president, not the group of advisors—however competent they may be—who are acting as his surrogates. The final responsibility for what happens in a democratic administration needs to reside in one democratically-elected person. The president’s advisors need to realize something is seriously wrong if they are doing the president’s work rather than working for the president.
Secondly, as a people, we deserve competent leadership. Running a country is hard; running it well is harder still. The greater the office, the greater the expectations we should have of those who aspire to it. We should not automatically assume someone is qualified to serve in public office so long as his or her partisan affiliation aligns with our own. They should be able to do the job, too. There are plenty of people out there who possess the necessary skills, smarts, judgment, and wisdom to serve the public well, and not only should parties be expected to nominate people who have those traits, but we the people should demand that of them.
As I write that, I feel I need to hold myself accountable for what I’ve written about Biden over the past four years. Before the June 2024 debate, I wrote three articles in which I addressed at some length Biden’s capacity to serve:
In a July 2023 article, I acknowledged the public’s dissatisfaction with Biden, which I attributed to his age. I also raised the possibility that the White House was limiting his public appearances so as not to further erode his support. I wrote I felt some of the public’s criticism of Biden was unfair, as he demonstrated command of the issues in public events and seemed more disciplined as president than as vice president (I stand by that; as vice president, when he was taking orders from higher-ups in the Obama White House, Biden had a tendency to shoot from the hip, while the authority that comes with the presidency seemed to focus him.) While admitting the president’s most important work happened out of the public eye in conversations and negotiations with other political actors (and assuming this is where the senatorial Biden excelled) I also recognized the president needs to be a public-facing figure and that Biden struggled mightily in this regard. I concluded by confessing I was of two minds as to what Biden should do in 2024: On the one hand, I felt he may have been a man out of time and that he should not run for re-election, but on the other, I appreciated how he had successfully kept the Democratic coalition together. Ultimately, I ended up writing more about the lack of confidence the public had in Kamala Harris to take over for an ailing Biden than the underlying problem itself, which was Biden’s fitness to serve. If I felt public unease with Biden necessitated finding a different vice president, however, I should have just come out and said the Democrats needed to find a different president.
In a November 2023 article reviewing the Democrats’ positive results in that month’s elections, I wrote, “there is too much at stake for Democrats to simply defer to the tradition of re-nominating the incumbent president” and that “my gut tells me it would be wise for Biden to step aside.” I still expressed uncertainty about it, though, and trotted out many of the arguments I made in my July 2023 article to defend Biden. Still, I concluded the public’s “perception” of Biden as an infirm president was a very high hurdle for Biden to clear with voters. I urged the president to stand down “not because I think Biden hasn’t earned a second term” but because “the Democratic brand works against both the MAGA and MAGA-adjacent brand, yet the Biden brand has consistently lagged the Democratic brand.” At the end of the day, that’s a political conclusion—fair in politics—but not a strong normative one.
I opened a February 2024 article published after the release of the damning Robert Hur report with this line: “Joe Biden needs to stand down as a candidate for president in 2024.” What concerned me more than the report was Biden’s far from reassuring response to it. I still defended Biden’s record but concluded Biden no longer had what it took to run a vigorous campaign against Trump.
That’s it, though, In retrospect, Biden’s capacity to serve as president was a major issue. I wrote little about it, however.
I should have taken Biden’s physical and mental condition at face value. My failure to do that is partially a result of my inclination to focus on policy and results. On those terms, Biden was a successful president, and I wanted readers to appreciate that. Yet as a Democrat pulling hard for his party to win, I also didn’t scrutinize Biden hard enough. As someone who has always prioritized competence as a key leadership trait, that was a mistake.
With that said, this entire conversation needs to be placed in a broader context. There is a danger here that as people pile onto Biden, his advisors, and the Democratic Party that people begin to conclude those political players are at the root of this country’s problems. Yes, they didn’t do enough to stop Trump. That is damning. But we’re mad at them because the political forces they failed to counter are so much worse.
I know people don’t like arguments about needing to choose between the lesser of two evils, but only one of the choices in 2024—Trump—was unacceptable. The fact is that even if Biden wouldn’t have been completely with it during his second term as president, he had a proven team in place that could competently administer the state. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work, but it would have worked. There’s also no doubt that a Biden or Harris administration would have been infinitely better than the fascist/quasi-fascist/fascist-adjacent regime we’re saddled with now. A Biden-Trump match-up was far from ideal. Both candidates were deeply flawed. Only one candidate, however, was rotten to the core.
We should not hold Democrats accountable for Republican sins. Yes, 2024 should have been an “all hands on deck” moment for the Democratic Party and the nation as a whole. We needed to do whatever we could through the electoral process to stop Trump. We failed to do that because we waited too long to replace our fading captain. But the Democratic Party didn’t nominate Trump for president. The Republicans did. You can be furious with Democrats for not stopping the Republicans’ tyrannical presidential nominee, but that also means Republicans have way more hell to pay.
Intermission
A new EP from Bruce Springsteen drawn from his Manchester, England, shows:
Song listing:
1. “Land of Hope and Dreams” (Introduction)
2. “Land of Hope and Dreams”
3. “Long Walk Home”
4. “My City of Ruins” (Introduction)
5. “My City of Ruins”
6. “Chimes of Freedom” (Bob Dylan cover)
From the Washington Post: “Bruce Springsteen is Fighting For the America He Sings About” by Chris Richards
Signals and Noise
From Substack:
From The Atlantic:
“Kristi Noem Should Probably Know What Habeas Corpus Is” by Jonathan Chait (“Appearing before a Senate hearing this morning, Noem was asked by Senator Maggie Hassan, ‘What is habeas corpus?’ Noem, whose hearing prep clearly did not anticipate any questions with Latin terms in them, replied, ‘Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country, and suspend their right to—’ At this point, Hassan interjected to explain that habeas corpus is, in fact, ‘the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people.’ In other words, it’s the opposite of what Noem said. It’s not a right the president possesses, but a right the people possess against the president.”)
“Trump’s Newest Crackdown on Dissent” by David A. Graham
“The Talented Mr. Vance” by George Packer
“Trump is Tired of Courts Telling Him He’s Breaking the Law” by Adam Serwer
“The Simple Formula That Explains Why the Debt Matters” by Rogé Karma
“Trump’s Plan to Cap Drug Prices Doesn’t Exist” by Rogé Karma
“The Trump Administration’s Favorite Answer” by David A. Graham
“What Are People Still Doing on X?” by Charlie Warzel
From the New York Times:
“The MAGA Movement’s Empty Vision of the Future” by Jamelle Bouie
“Three Well-Tested Ways to Undermine an Autocrat” by Nicholas Kristof
“If Justice Dept. Can’t Prosecute Trump’s Foes, It Will ‘Shame’ Them, Official Says” by Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer
From the Washington Post:
“How a Salvadoran Prison Became a Political Human Zoo” by Carolina A. Miranda
“I Have Seen the Future of AI. It’s in Western Pennsylvania.” by Salena Zito
“Souter’s Subtle Reasoning Defied ‘Liberal’ and ‘Conservative’ Labels” by George F. Will
“If the Hall of Fame is Open to Pete Rose, It Should Find a Spot for Curt Flood” by Kevin B. Blackistone
From Vox:
“The Reconciliation Bill is Republicans Doing What They Do Best” by Dylan Matthews
“Christian Nationalists Decided Empathy is a Sin. Now It’s Gone Mainstream” by Aja Romano
“The Forgotten Book That Foretold Trump’s Power Grab” by Zack Beauchamp