U.S. President Joe Biden speaks with 'This Week' anchor George Stephanopoulos on July 5, for an interview televised on ABC.Supplied/Getty Images
The political crisis consuming a great nation is unresolved, the Democratic Party is in upheaval, and the American political system is in paralysis. Joe Biden is still running for re-election.
By continuing his fourth presidential campaign, Mr. Biden, who had redeemed his party’s desperate call to deny Donald Trump the White House four years ago, continues to hold out against the desperate calls that he abandon an effort to try to do it again.
With a dramatic interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that aired Friday evening, bumping the broadcast of a Jeopardy! Masters re-run, Mr. Biden renewed his commitment to continuing a re-election drive that, in a mere eight days since his disastrous debate performance, had been transformed from deliberate to distressed.
The old warrior – veteran of fights over civil rights and Supreme Court cases, master practitioner of a brand of bipartisan co-operation that he has outlived by two decades – refuses to succumb to the notion that a man who was elected to the Senate at age 29 is now, at age 81, an old man.
In an excerpt of the ABC interview, he said his debate performance was a “bad episode” and not an indication of a broader “condition.” His comment that he probably didn’t see a tape of the session (“I don’t think I did, no”) almost certainly did not settle doubts that are growing among leading Democrats.
A political figure who once symbolized that all things were possible is raging against the growing conviction that winning – and serving – another presidential term is impossible for him.
With the Biden campaign continuing, so does an equally consequential period of American national reckoning. Now, the world’s oldest political party, shaped in the second half of the last century by the youthful gladiators John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, remains shackled by its ancient mariner instead of racing into a new age and, as Mr. Kennedy said in his anthem-like 1961 inaugural address, a new generation of leadership.
Party leaders and Democratic donors increasingly believe the party must choose a new standard bearer. If that eventually happens, Mr. Biden appears likely to prefer the anointment of his understudy, Vice-President Kamala Harris, as replacement nominee. Such a choice would echo the principle the Canadian poet and First World War artilleryman John McCrae articulated in his 1915 classic poem, In Flanders Fields: “To you from failing hands we throw / The torch be yours to hold it high.”
In that case, the country’s liberal power brokers and the Democrats’ old masters – two former presidents, Mr. Clinton and Barack Obama, and two former nominees, Hillary Clinton (2016) and John Kerry (2004) – likely will rally to the side of Ms. Harris, a minority woman whose set of political identities are indispensable to the party’s cause and prospects.
Others – believing that if the torch is passed, they will be passed over for the country’s greatest political prize – will feel otherwise.
It has long been a precept of American civic life that the tides in the country’s politics are governed by timing. Younger governors, especially Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan (53 the day after the Democratic National Convention in August), Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania (turned 51 only weeks ago) and Gavin Newsom of California (about to turn 57) will calculate that if Ms. Harris serves two full terms they will be 61, 59 and 65, respectively – and, term limits being in place in their states, possibly out of the limelight. They may challenge the old bulls of the party and run 2024 campaigns, subterranean if necessary, public if possible. This is, after all, the age of the insurgent, as the 78-year-old GOP presidential candidate demonstrates.
In choosing to remain in the presidential race, Mr. Biden has decided to identify himself more closely with Franklin Delano Roosevelt than with his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, who decided not to run again in 1908 after serving as president since 1901. FDR, the architect of the New Deal that Mr. Biden sought to replicate with giant infrastructure plans and sweeping social programs, suffered from congestive heart failure as the 1944 campaign approached. He announced his willingness to accept a fourth term the day after his doctor was informed by a specialist that if he ran in 1944, he likely would not survive the four years.
Concerns about Mr. Biden’s health, stamina and mental acuity long preceded his debate against Mr. Trump late last month. But his halting performance and gaunt appearance at the debate were shocking to viewers, and revelatory to Democratic office holders who see their own election chances in contests for the House of Representatives and Senate suddenly endangered, if not doomed. The episode had the effect that Samuel Johnson recognized in the 18th century when he said, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
In one humiliating evening, an entire party’s mind was concentrated.
For more than a week, despondent Biden aides and supporters have lived in denial. They have rallied behind their man, a display of loyalty for the ages, remarkable in an era of rapidly shifting alliances and fleeting attachments. They have attributed his debate performance to a cold. They have said a half-century of service should not be destroyed by 90 minutes of stammering and near-incoherence. They have all but argued that the contretemps around the debate was, in the contemporary phrase, a nothingburger, when in fact it seemed for all the world instead to be an Impossible Burger.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Theodore Roosevelt decided not to run again in 1912. He decided not to run again in 1908. This version has been updated.