Give Michael Bennet credit. On a day when most Democrats at the Capitol were in full panic mode, but were plainly unwilling to admit the depth of that panic, Bennet spoke the truth.
Well, not all the truth. But at least some of it.
And speaking much of the truth — that he thinks Donald Trump is headed toward victory, and possibly by a landslide — put him well ahead of most of his Democratic Senate colleagues.
And if it doesn’t scare you to hear that from Bennet, a measured politician who doesn’t talk just to hear the sound of his voice, it should.
In a closed-door Senate Democratic caucus meeting Tuesday, Bennet was among the few — others were reported to include Ohio’s Sherrod Brown and Montana’s Jon Tester, both of them in tight races this November — warning that Biden and the Democrats were surely headed for disaster in November.
Once CNN reported the news, Bennet decided to go public, telling anchor Kaitlan Collins what he told his colleagues.
“Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election and maybe win in a landslide — and take with him the Senate and the House,” Bennet said on CNN.
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“For me, this is not a question about polling. This isn’t a question about politics. It’s a moral question about the future of our country. It’s critically important that we come to grips with what we face … if we put Trump on the path to the White House.”
What Bennet didn’t say — and what must be said — is that Biden, in the wake of the disastrous debate that set off questions about his fitness to take on Trump, must step aside.
Bennet nearly got there. He said that if Trump won — and especially if Republicans took Congress, too — it would be an “American tragedy.”
And he said, “I’m sure President Biden has a different vision of his prospects in this election than I do. But we should have a discussion about that. The White House, in the time since that disastrous debate, I think, has done nothing to demonstrate that they have a plan to win this election, that they have a convincing plan to win in the battleground states.”
And he further pointed out that Biden is now trailing in the polls by more than three points — and that at this time in 2020, Biden was winning by nine. At this point in the race, he added, Hillary Clinton was winning by five.
But when asked repeatedly by Collins whether Biden should step aside, Bennet wouldn’t go that far. Presumably, Democrats wouldn’t go that far during NATO’s meeting, where Biden just gave a forceful speech.
The question now is whether they ever will.
On Tuesday, as the House and Senate were returning from a long break, Democrats in both houses met separately to discuss the Biden issue — and, inevitably, to discuss the fact that Biden has made it more than clear he has no intentions of making it easy for them.
A few days ago, it seemed that Biden had little choice but to step aside. The momentum against him was too great. The post-debate image of him too dire. The stakes too high. The polls too troubling. The gathering danger of a Trumpian restoration all too clear.
It took more than a week, but Biden finally came up with a strategy to try to save his campaign. He would make it personal. He would be defiant. And for those politicians in his party who were wavering, he would try to make the fate of his campaign into a loyalty test.
It’s too soon to say that congressional Democrats buckled — there’s still time for those who agree with Bennet to try to persuade Biden to step aside — but it’s not too soon to say they blinked.
Before the meeting, Biden’s strategy was working well enough that Bennet told reporters that an open debate about the future of the ticket “is an act not of disloyalty, but of loyalty.”
And loyalty to the country, we should add, should easily trump loyalty to any president.
You have to remember how we got to this point. It was Biden who called for a June debate to change the narrative and prove to the world that he was fit to take on — and defeat — Donald Trump.
Instead of changing the narrative, though, the debate would come to serve as an alternate version of a cognitive test, even as Biden repeatedly says he doesn’t need to take a test that would measure his mental acuity.
By the way, I’m six years younger than Biden, and I’ve taken the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. It’s what they recommend when you get, uh, older.
Biden failed that debate test so utterly it seemed to many Democrats that he wasn’t up to the job of saving the country from the dystopia promised by another Trump presidency. (See: Project 2025, a plan for Trump’s second term so radical and so destructive and so subversive that Trump is now trying to pretend he knows nothing about it. Yeah, he’s lying.)
At this point, Biden refuses to address the cognition issue, and Democrats, for the most part, have refused to call him on that. Instead, after an unimpressive showing with George Stephanopoulos Friday night, Biden turned to Morning Joe on Monday to make his case.
Biden railed against the so-called elites, the press, the pundits, the Hollywood liberal establishment and the other usual suspects. He claimed they were trying to push him out, were piling on, did not credit him for his many successes and ignored Trump’s lie-filled debate performance. He said he didn’t believe the polls that show him trailing.
It is painful to watch Biden play the victim as he blames party elites. It’s as if he had forgotten who helped clear the way for him to win the 2020 Democratic primary and who helped persuade Biden’s rivals to drop out of the race to ensure that he would be the one — and not Bernie Sanders — to take on Trump.
Party elites intervened for Biden — because they thought he had the best chance to beat Trump — in 2020. Now they’re intervening again because they’re afraid he can’t.
But how deep into an intervention are they willing to go?
☀️ MORE FROM MIKE LITTWIN
After the House caucus meeting, Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York acted as if he didn’t think they’d go very far. Over the weekend, he had privately called for Biden to step aside.
But after Tuesday’s meeting, he had this to say: “Whether or not I have concerns is beside the point. He is going to be our nominee, and we all have to support him.”
When Bennet spoke to reporters the day before the caucus meetings, he assured them that Democrats would take seriously the question of whether Biden should be the nominee at the August Democratic convention, which is now less than six weeks away.
“We’re not Donald Trump’s cult of personality, we’re the Democratic Party,” Bennet said.
As if that were enough.
So far, it’s not nearly enough. It’s time, past time, for Democrats to admit the dire situation facing the party and, more to the point, facing the country. And it’s time, past time, to do what must be done.
Telling the truth, the whole truth, would be a start.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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