JOE BIDEN OWES THE COUNTRY AN EXPLANATION. President Joe Biden is scheduled to make a live address to the nation tonight at 9 p.m. That is a violation of his plan “to stop scheduling events after 8 p.m. so that he can get more sleep,” according to news reports earlier this month when he was still struggling to hold on to the Democratic nomination. But it is extremely important that he stay up and tell the public what is going on.
In the last week, the president, weak and infirm, contracted COVID-19 and went into isolation. There, behind closed doors, he was forced by a group of powerful Democratic insiders to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race. He then endorsed the vice president, Kamala Harris, for the Democratic nomination, and party leaders, despite earlier talk of a mini primary or some other democratic process to choose a new nominee, stampeded to hand Harris the prize within hours of Biden’s decision.
To call the series of events weird would be an understatement. Biden is obligated to tell us what happened.
How can he explain it? Will he say that, yes, he really is old and senile and is just not up to the job for the next four years? It seems highly unlikely that Biden, whose entire campaign was based on his claim that he was fully able to serve as president, will suddenly admit that he is not. Doing so, of course, would open the question of whether he is able to serve for the next six months, which would be a matter of the gravest concern to all the public. Do you believe he will say that? I don’t.
OK, so if Biden does not admit that he is physically and mentally unable to serve as president, perhaps he will rely on an alternate explanation — that the polls showed him trailing former President Donald Trump both nationally and in key swing states. Although Biden has denied the validity of the polls and we all know that polls can change in the more than three months before Election Day, he nevertheless decided it would be best to withdraw. Again, do you believe Biden will say that? I don’t.
The fact is, there isn’t a very good explanation for what happened. For this reason: It has been clear for years that Biden was declining mentally and physically and that he was not able to serve a second term as president. (We are seeing now, of course, that he was not able to serve a first term, as well.) But Biden denied it all and went full speed ahead with his reelection bid. The Democratic Party, including all those powerful insiders mentioned above, went along with Biden, doing its part to conceal Biden’s infirmity and act as if he were able to continue serving as president.
That act came to a crashing halt on June 27 with the debate between Biden and Trump. The Democratic panic that began that night never abated. Biden tried to quiet concerns in his party, but each attempt — a speech, an interview — backfired on him and raised the party’s already-high concern that he was unable to serve.
That’s when the powerful party insiders stepped in. They mounted a behind-the-scenes campaign to push Biden out of the race. Biden resisted. They pushed some more. Biden resisted some more. Finally, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who has a legendary reputation inside the Democratic Party as a tough enforcer, stepped in. According to Politico: “‘Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,’ said one Democrat familiar with private conversations. … ‘She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.'”
Then Biden caved. There are all sorts of things Pelosi could have threatened him with as part of the “hard way.” The party could have starved the Biden campaign of money. It could have begun a campaign of leaks confirming Biden’s senescence. It could have stopped defending Biden against Republican attacks. It could have, in other words, hung Biden out to dry. Yes, that is a self-defeating course for a political party to take in an election year, but the plan would have been to make life so painful for Biden that he would quickly relent.
In any event, Biden decided he did not want to have anything to do with the “hard way.” Was the process democratic, with a small “d”? Not even close. But the Democratic Party, the political leaders who speak passionately about preserving American democracy, chose to bypass the democratic path — no mini primaries for them — in favor of muscling the enfeebled president out of the race. Someone, like Biden himself, should at least tell us how it happened.