If Biden had stayed in the race and lost, he would not have been able to win the fight he declared for the soul of America. Now, the soul of America has a chance to fight.
So too will Biden’s major legislative and regulatory legacies on public investment, labor, civil rights, financial transparency, strengthening economic competition, the environment and climate.
Biden did not come to this decision easily, and who could have expected otherwise? Never before in the modern era of primaries had a candidate been forced to give up a nomination he had won fair and square just weeks before the convention.
This is why Democratic leaders largely sat back for most of the three weeks following his disastrous defeat in the June 27 presidential debate. They tried to be as polite as possible so as not to seem like they were getting in the way of the president. In fact, my own reporting has shown that most senators who found Biden’s efforts unsustainable were happy to endorse him before the debate. They really think highly of him, despite Biden’s suspicions to the contrary. They admire his extraordinary track record. They thought early in the year, and well into the year, that he could make it through the campaign and the next four years.
Biden’s disastrous performance in the debates, in which he often appeared lost for words, erased that credibility.
“Before the debate started, Trump was viewed as a risk to the country, and that remains the case today,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vermont), the first senator to call on Biden to withdraw, told me. “But after the debate ended, many voters began to view Biden’s health as a risk to the country.”
More Democrats than ever called for Biden to “pass the baton”—a phrase one congressman told me was carefully chosen to emphasize that the president’s withdrawal was not a passive act of surrender but an active decision by someone who could burnish his own legacy by forging ahead to defeat someone he has repeatedly denounced as a threat to American democracy.
Now that Biden has acted, Democrats need to quickly identify a new nominee and move forward with the process of uniting the party — two issues that have divided them as Democrats.
Many in the party, particularly black leaders but also Biden supporters, would be upset if Biden did not quickly nominate Harris to replace him — a move Biden boosted her chances by immediately endorsing her — but others say an open, democratic process is needed to build trust in the party and its eventual choice.
Both sides have a point: choosing anyone other than Harris, who has already been thoroughly vetted, would create chaos the party can’t tolerate, and abandoning an entire field of candidates three months before the election would look bad. But Democrats need to arrive at Harris through a process that the party as a whole agrees is fair.
That would only strengthen Harris’ candidacy, as would a strong running mate — there are plenty of good candidates for Harris, including North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Biden’s decision will energize a party that was already confident it could win, thanks to Trump’s 92-minute speech on Thursday that wore down even his most ardent supporters. Trump’s lack of discipline and fondness for his old tricks alienated him from the advice of his advisers, who understood the natural outpouring of sympathy for Trump after the assassination attempt. They promised that he would share moving personal stories and call for national unity.
But the new Trump was a temporary invention that could not survive in contact with Trump’s own instincts. The return of the old Trump put the Democrats back in business. But to keep business going, Biden needed to make a move.
The choices were painful, but the president should and deserves to be happy with the outcome. None of what happened reflects negatively on his record as president. He didn’t flop in the debates. His age betrayed him.
Biden has always presented himself as the man who could best defend democracy by stopping Trump again. Paradoxically, he stayed true to that mission by withdrawing from the race. He did the hardest thing a politician can do: relinquish power. His decision saved his legacy.
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