What the Hell is Wrong with the Democrats?

The party needs to wake up and stop sleepwalking toward catastrophe with Biden

President Joe Biden during a bilateral meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the Oval Office of the White House on February 9, 2024 in Washington, DC.(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Back in early September 2023, I wrote a post with the title, “Hey Ho, Joe’s Gotta Go: Democrats Are Sleepwalking Toward Catastrophe with Biden.”

I’d say the disturbing events of last week—above all Special Counsel Robert Hur’s comments about Joe Biden’s struggles with memory—provide an occasion to revisit the argument I made there about the president’s weakness as a candidate, with special emphasis on the Democratic Party’s role in allowing us to head into the 2024 election with a presumptive nominee who may well be incapable of defeating former president Donald Trump.

Who Are You Gonna Believe? The Democratic Party or Your Lying Eyes and Ears?

I want to begin by making one thing perfectly clear: I am going to be voting for the Democratic nominee in November, whether or not it’s Joe Biden. I would be doing that even if the party ran a potted plant in Biden’s place. (A potted plant aligned with the Democratic Party would sit at the center of an administration staffed by competent, well-meaning public servants who would keep the nation functioning until a human being could be found to take over from the vegetation as commander-in-chief.)

This commitment should surprise no one—not so much because I’m a devoted Democrat as that I’m a committed anti-Republican. As I frequently remind readers, I’m a former conservative who hasn’t voted for the GOP since 2002. Why?

• Because I think the Republican Party and its right-wing media allies intentionally spew demagogic toxins into the civic atmosphere of the nation for the sake of political gain.

• Because that isn’t going to change. (Like a three-pack-a-day smoker waiving away the possibility of lung cancer even after symptoms of serious illness have appeared, Republican voters have become addicted to the poison and demand more of it with each new election.)

• And most of all, because, like a highly skilled conman/drug pusher, Donald Trump deepens the deadly addiction every day, along with posing a potentially fatal threat to the country’s democratic institutions.

So: I will be voting for the Democrats in November no matter what. But I will do so despite thinking the party and its loudest champions in the commentariat have long made, and very much continue to make, bafflingly—infuriatingly—stupid decisions. What’s a good example? How about this: The party’s presumptive nominee for president against a dangerous threat to the country and the world currently sits at (an anemic and very steady) 38.5 percent approval. That’s

• 5 points behind where Trump came in exactly four years ago.

• And 10 points behind where Barack Obama stood at this point in his presidency, as he prepared to run for re-election.

• And 13 points behind George W. Bush in February 2004.

• And 10 points behind Bill Clinton in February 1996.

• And 6 points behind George H. W. Bush (who, like Trump, went on to lose) in February 1992.

I could go on, moving ever-further back in time, but I trust you get the point.

Underlying these distressingly low numbers is this even more chilling fact: No less than 76 percent of the country and half of Democrats worry Biden lacks “the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term.” Those figures, which are in line with the results of numerous previous polls, come from a survey released before Special Counsel Robert Hur’s damning comments about Biden’s difficulties with memory.

Yet partisan Democrats, from the president on down, responded with anger and defensiveness to Hur’s report. The Special Counsel’s a Republican taking political potshots! This is so unfair! How dare he—and how dare news organizations lead with his unproven accusations rather than explaining why people should dismiss his partisan hit job!

To which I’m inclined to respond: Oh, for the love of God, stop whining!

The reason Hur’s comments seemed damaging is that they confirmed what three-quarters of the country already suspects: Biden is too old and frail for the job he holds right now, and so the prospect of him serving for another five years is a perfectly reasonable source of concern or dread, especially because his running mate is just as unpopular as he is.

And yet, there’s CNN and MSNBC running interviews all weekend with prominent Democrats trying to get viewers to deny the evidence of their own senses and judgment. Biden’s fine! Sharp as he’s ever been! He works more in an hour than most people do in a day!

Why would the party assume this is more likely to mollify skittish voters than to convince them the entire Democratic Party is trying to sell them a line of bullshit?

Yes, it’s just an anecdote (though also one backed up by what 76 percent of the country is telling pollsters), but here’s what a well-educated, professional, liberal woman who’s close to our family in the solidly blue Philadelphia suburbs told me a few weeks ago when the conversation turned to politics: “Biden looks impaired to me. His eyes are nearly shut with a squint. His face is frozen like he’s on anti-Parkinson’s drugs. He slurs when he speaks. He shuffles when he walks. He’s too old to be President!”

You don’t say.

Bad Decisions Are Our Brand

How the hell have we ended up in this situation?

Because of the decisions of a long list of Democrats.

The lion’s share of the blame belongs to Biden himself. His decision to run for re-election after initially saying in 2019 that he’d probably only serve for four years is understandable in human terms but indefensible in political ones. It’s very common for a person—and especially a man—to deny the truth about his own decline and the need to pull back from responsibilities and independence with advancing age. How many elderly men, when told by their families that the time has come, for their own good, to move into assisted living, respond with acquiescence? Not many! The transition is often a painful, arduous struggle for everyone involved.

A good part of the reason for it is stubborn pride. But decline itself can impair judgment, with the elderly person losing the capacity to evaluate his own condition honestly. Often close family members, equally disinclined to accept the reality of what’s happening, become complicit in the self-deception. (I’m looking at you, Jill Biden.)

Whatever its sources, President Biden is putting his own self-regard ahead of the good of the country—and as a result, both he and his party are badly undermining the most compelling rationale of the 2024 campaign, as data analyst Nate Silver has been repeatedly (and with increasingly understandable exasperation) arguing for months.

Many Democrats will say it’s too late now. And that’s true, if we’re talking about having an open primary season in which voters get to decide on an alternative nominee. But was it too late when I wrote that post in early September? No, it was not. I didn’t advocate a hostile primary challenge to try and unseat Biden as the presumptive nominee. (I thought that was unlikely to work, and could do more political damage than good.) But I did suggest that leading Democrats (Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer; I should have included Bill Clinton) speak to the president, thank him for his career-long service to the country, and then implore him to step aside in favor of another option.

But, as far as we know, this never happened. Instead, except for Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips’ quixotic primary challenge, the party has circled the wagons, angrily swatting away any talk of pushing Biden to make way for someone else.

As my friend and fellow Substacker Noah Millman pointed out in a smart post the other day, this should remind us of something.

In 2015 and 2016, Democrats were furious that the Republican witch hunt against Hillary Clinton had spun a bunch of misdemeanor offenses and mistakes into something worth investigation by the FBI…. They thought this was so unfair, and Hillary Clinton so clearly owed her shot to become the first woman president, that they not only didn’t try to stop her from running, but cleared the field of plausible opposition (including Biden) and chose as their nominee someone under active investigation by the FBI. They dared the American people not to believe Clinton’s version of events, and when they failed to achieve that objective they forced the American people to choose between two people they didn’t like or trust, confident that Trump’s disqualifications were so much more obvious and substantial that they could easily win that contest.

We all know how that turned out.

Yet the party seems firmly committed to doing the same thing again eight years later—sticking with a candidate hobbled by serious liabilities because s/he is supposedly entitled to the nomination and daring the voters to cast ballots for Trump.

For God’s sake, why?

The Democratic Party (as an institution, but maybe also at the level of a mindset shared by many of its most prominent officeholders and media cheerleaders) appears to be stuck in a self-destructive contradiction, combining paralyzing risk aversion (We can’t change horses in mid-stream! It’ll be chaos!) with unjustified arrogance (Republicans are such morons to nominate Trump-the-loser again! That plus Dobbs means we’re golden! We’re so likely to prevail, you might as well ignore the polls!)

I’d wager it’s that unstable mixture of emotional responses that produces the kind of unseemly displays we’ve seen since last Thursday, with just about everyone on the center-left pretending everything would be perfectly fine and dandy with the Biden campaign if only the Special Counsel hadn’t played his dirty tricks and the insufficiently anti-Trump media hadn’t conspired with him to amplify the dishonest insinuations.

We’ve been through all of this before, too. Democrats always find a Diabolus ex Machina to blame for failure: If it’s not Vladimir Putin, it’s Robert Hur. Anyone but those making inexplicably bad decisions in the Democratic Party.

A Better Future

What would I like to see? Every major figure in the party prevailing against Biden to drop out. That can be done behind the scenes at first, out of respect for the President. But if he refuses, then it will be time for embarrassing leaks to the press. Hopefully Biden will see that the only way to preserve his reputation, record, and self-respect is to announce, somewhat like Lyndon Johnson did on March 31, 1968, that he’s withdrawing from the race. He should also announce that the delegates he’s won up to that point in the primaries will be freed up at the convention to throw in behind whichever person seems best placed to beat Trump.

In his Saturday column in the New York Times, Ross Douthat suggested Biden hold off on making such an announcement until the August convention itself, or at least until the primaries are over. But I think that would be a mistake, since it would guarantee several more months of bad press, making the eventual announcement seem more beleaguered and desperate than it needs to be. Better to drop out sooner and allow open jockeying for support within the party among multiple candidates to begin right away.

Would this an ideal process? Not at all. Biden should have announced a year ago his intent to retire on January 20, 2025. But here we are. Better late than never remains a wise bit of advice in many situations, including this one, since it would give the party more of a fighting chance against Trump in the crucial final months of the campaign.

As for those insisting Biden would have to treat Harris as his heir apparent for fear of alienating the party’s base of black voters, I think this is another good example of misplaced risk aversion. The party’s message should be that no one is entitled to a presidential nomination. If Harris wants it, she will have to persuade her party she’s more likely to defeat Trump than such formidable alternatives as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock. That’s how politics works—or should work.

More generally, what I’d really like to see is the Democratic Party and its defenders spending more time running popular, charismatic candidates and less time desperately trying to work the refs; more time doing whatever is necessary to win and less time trying to prove Democrats deserve to win.¹ (As Clint Eastwood’s character puts it with brutal realism in The Unforgiven, “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”)

Donald Trump is a sociopathic menace who needs to be defeated in November. However well suited Joe Biden was to the task of dispatching him four years ago, the situation has changed. Biden cannot possibly be the best person for the job. The time to fix this mess is now—before it really is too late.

1. I owe this point to Noah Millman as well.