Vice-President Kamala Harris speaks at her campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., on July 22.Erin Schaff/The Associated Press
Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential campaign has produced a striking departure in the character of American public life. For the first time since 1972, there will not be a Dole, Bush, Clinton or Biden on a national political ticket.
As Americans conjure an altered political landscape and a thoroughly reshaped presidential election, the country also confronts two vital questions that could not have been posed even a month ago.
First, how could security personnel have permitted a sniper to crouch so close to Donald Trump, one of the presidential candidates they were protecting? And second, how much did insiders know about Mr. Biden’s compromised mental acuity – and why did they keep his decline a secret?
“We are all trying to figure that out,” Democratic Representative Annie Kuster said in an interview Monday. “Everybody is revisiting the thinking that he would just manage through this – and people who spent time with him are revisiting whether and how they saw the signs of aging.”
Or, in the time-honoured locution that has been a part of Washington life since the Watergate years: What did the President’s staffers know, and when did they know it?
Gary Mason: Kamala Harris’s early momentum shows there’s a path for Democratic recovery
The ascendancy of Kamala Harris as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee may transform the issue of a candidate being too old from a Democratic burden to one facing the Republicans and Mr. Trump, their 78-year-old nominee.
It does not, however, represent the advent of a new generation of leadership for the Democrats. Three months from her 60th birthday, Ms. Harris approaches her general-election contest for president more than a dozen years older than Barack Obama was when he faced his first national election day in 2008.
But the eclipse of four recurring political families – whose prominence in American politics began with Bob Dole’s selection as the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1976 and will expire at the end of the Biden presidency in January – nonetheless signals a new beginning in the country’s politics.
Dynastic politics may be anathema to democratic values, but it is firmly a part of American history. The Adams, Harrison, Roosevelt and Bush families each produced two presidents. The Kennedy family accounts for one president, three senators, four members of the House of Representatives, one state lieutenant governor and several ambassadors.
But Ms. Harris, with no ancestors with a political pedigree – her mother was a cancer researcher who spent several years at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research of Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital – and no children of her own, is not a part of such a dynasty.
As a female politician with Black and South Asian roots, she also is not part of a generations-long power circle. That’s true both in California, where she was state attorney-general and where she was elected to the Senate, and in Washington, where even vice-presidents with strong personalities and records, such as former House Speaker John Nance Garner, former Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson and former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, felt diminished.
But now, Ms. Harris has made a significant leap that could transform both her place in history and her role in government – a contrast with Mr. Biden, who earned his place in the political establishment by dint of his longevity, with 36 years in the Senate and eight in the vice-presidency.
Democratic worries about her low approval ratings have been blunted by the more than US$80-million that donors poured into her campaign in her first day as the party’s presumptive nominee. They are also taking comfort in polls showing Ms. Harris in a marginally more advantageous position against Mr. Trump than Mr. Biden was.
Meanwhile, for Republicans and the Trump inner circle, great confidence only 48 hours earlier is replaced by a new calculus they must confront. The principal Trump funding arm has invested US$11-million in new television advertisements that already are appearing in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia. They accuse Ms. Harris of helping to hide what they call Mr. Biden’s “obvious mental decline.”
Indeed, there is fresh attention on the efforts White House staff and campaign officials employed in private to keep up the spirits of the President even as they masked his condition from the public. For weeks after his lack of engagement was apparent during the debate, Mr. Biden’s aides were assuring him that his poll numbers were holding up. They were not.
Besides, national poll numbers – as former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 presidential election despite winning the popular vote, discovered – are irrelevant in a system where results are determined by the tally in the Electoral College.
It became clear, moreover, that while Mr. Biden had mastery of the past, he had no vision of the future for a country that, since its founding, has been forward-looking.
Worried party members, noting that the President had been cloistered inside the White House and kept from personal appearances on Capitol Hill, were determined to replace him at the top of the Democratic ticket. But they wanted to give him the respect they felt he had earned and the time required for him to come to peace with leaving the race.
By the weekend, they had grown impatient and were ready to step up the effort to force him to step aside. So he departed the race Sunday, in advance of a deluge of fresh calls for his withdrawal that were ready to be issued 24 hours later. Some Democratic insiders cringed at the chants of “Four more years!” when there were worries whether the President could even last for four more months.
Once Mr. Biden made his announcement, Democrats expressed publicly the argument that they had been making to him in private: that by leaving the race, the President was enhancing his reputation and could emerge as a symbol of sacrifice and patriotism.
“He showed he is a true public servant,” Democratic Governor John Carney of Delaware, who has close ties to the Biden family, said in an interview.
“History will speak well of him. He was able to get much done, doing it the way he’s always done it – bringing people together. If he’s pleased with this development and being out of the race, we’re pleased with it.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article misstated the last election that didn't have a Dole, Bush, Clinton or Biden on a U.S. presidential ticket. This version has been corrected.