Photo: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA(Sipa via AP Images)
“An actual hero,” wrote New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein of President Joe Biden on X, within 30 minutes of the president’s announcement Sunday that he was — finally — ending his run for a second term. “This is what America First looks like when it’s a lived ethos, rather than a mask for narcissism and ambition,” added Klein.
Klein was hardly the only notable liberal to rush to hagiography for the president.
“In a world increasingly filled with leaders who have changed laws, killed people, and stormed parliaments to cling to power, Joe Biden just flipped the script,” wrote former Obama adviser and “Pod Save the World” host Ben Rhodes.
“Mr. Biden has spent a lifetime trying to do right by the nation, and he did so in the most epic of ways when he chose to end his campaign for re-election,” wrote historian Jon Meacham in the New York Times on Monday.
It is rare to see political leaders willingly leave the stage of power. This is a problem with the nature of political power and the individuals to which it appeals. It is no reason, however, to treat Biden’s choice as one of radical sacrifice for the public good. The alternative would be disastrous: 81-year-old Biden continuing in stubborn refusal, a mumbling and resentful King Lear figure, demanding fealty while unable to recall the names of his senior Cabinet (he called Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin simply “a Black man” in an interview last week), among other embarrassments.
Reluctantly stepping down in the face of an evermore likely election loss is no more than reasonable. Commentators pretending this is primarily the story of a great leader felled by the eternal forces of time and mortality ignore central reasons for Biden’s unpopularity with young people and in key swing states like Michigan — above all his unconditional support for Israel’s genocidal war, which should forever mar his legacy.
If the Biden hagiographers agree on the grave risk of a second Trump presidency, and also agree that Biden is right to step away from the race, then the president’s decision should indeed occasion relief. Yet Biden’s weeks of intransigence and hubris, truncating the time for the Democrats to recalibrate behind a new candidate against Donald Trump, should at least temper current praise for the president.
In a letter written just two weeks ago defending his candidacy to congressional Democrats, Biden wrote, “We had a Democratic nomination process and the voters have spoken clearly and decisively. I received over 14 million votes, 87% of the votes cast across the entire nominating process. … This was a process open to anyone who wanted to run.” The idea that Biden succeeded in anything like an open primary is laughable: The Democratic National Committee treated Biden’s nomination as a fait accompli despite polls dating back over a year indicating that Democratic voters would prefer another candidate. The entire party machine bears responsibility for treating our current gerontocracy as the only possible option for so long.
“Biden was forced to step out of the race by his waning physical and mental dexterity, rather than by any policy failure,” reported the Financial Times. While it’s technically true that it was Biden’s abysmal debate performance and ongoing public gaffes that forced powerful allies like former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to urge him to step back, it was not his age and diminished acuity that meant Biden lost support in crucial swing states among young people and thousands of Muslim, and Arab voters, among others.
Biden’s strongest presidential achievements — the historic (if insufficient) Inflation Reduction Act climate legislation; the American Rescue Plan pandemic stimulus package; a significant pro-labor record — must be built upon, pushing the Democratic Party further to the left. Biden’s successes do not, however, erase a darker inventory.
Taking office mere months after nationwide uprisings against the U.S. racist policing system, Biden — who speaks proudly of his Senate past working with segregationists — opted to fuel further funding into police departments, while repressing Black-led protest movements. Willing to sacrifice the lives and well-being of millions more vulnerable people at the altar of capital and political point-scoring, Biden declared the Covid-19 pandemic “over” in only its second year.
The president has overseen a brutal hardening of borders, including a draconian executive order last month to temporarily shut down asylum requests at the U.S.–Mexico border. And, most damning at all, he has shown unforgivable, unwavering support for Israel’s genocide, while demonizing those who protest in support of Palestinian lives and freedoms.
Organizers with the Uncommitted movement — a non-negligible protest-voter bloc that pledges to vote “uncommitted” in order to push the Democrats to end support for Israel’s onslaught — have stressed that their position applies to any Democratic nominee.
“I think it would be a big mistake for the Democratic Party to switch gears but stay the course on this particular issue that has galvanized so many people in an unprecedented way in the primaries and who continue showing up and trying to advocate to be heard in a system that is continuing, they feel, to ignore them,” Halah Ahmad, a policy analyst and spokesperson with Listen to Wisconsin, the state’s “uninstructed” campaign, told The Intercept earlier this month.
As Biden’s vice president and near-certain successor as presidential nominee, Kamala Harris is stained by this administration’s intolerable support for Israel’s horrors, alongside other condemnable choices — like shuttering the southern border to asylum-seekers. If Harris simply continues in Biden’s footsteps, as an avatar for unchanged Biden policy in a younger body, this would be both a gross moral failure and an electoral misstep.
Harris should, as her meme-worthy comment dictates, attempt to be “unburdened by what has been” but attuned to this fraught context into which she did simply not fall, coconut-like. Instead of penning paeans to Biden, the focus must be pushing Harris — and the entire Democratic leadership — to alter course. The left would be naive to invest significant hope in Harris, the former prosecutor, beyond the urgency of beating Trump. Biden’s departure from the race, though, is an opening to push for nonnegotiable voter demands. A crucial place to start: Call for immediate ceasefire and an end to U.S. funding and arming of Israel’s war.