President Joe Biden has thrown down the gauntlet, telling Democrats he is staying put and that they should either end their talk of replacing him or challenge him at the convention next month.
If Biden is serious about beating back the post-debate Democratic revolt, he may need to emulate his opponent, former President Donald Trump.
Biden has already started pitting the Democratic elites against the party’s rank and file. He is appealing to his status as the winner of the primaries. He is even calling into Morning Joe.
Next the president needs to test his intraparty foes’ commitment to pushing him out of the race across multiple news cycles, as Trump has done a number of times.
THE PROMINENT DEMOCRATS CALLING ON BIDEN TO DROP OUT
The first time it looked like Trump’s political career might come to an end was the weekend the lewd Access Hollywood tape was released. Major Republican elected officials withdrew their endorsements, including Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the 2008 nominee. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) canceled what was to be their first-ever joint appearance. Republicans floated moving Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, to the top of the ticket, perhaps with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as his new veep pick.
“I’ll tell you what I’m hearing,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus told Trump. “Either you’ll lose in the biggest landslide in history, or you can get out of the race and let somebody else run who can win.”
Trump stayed in the race. He counterpunched in his second debate with Hillary Clinton two days later, bringing along women who had accused former President Bill Clinton of varying degrees of sexual misconduct. The news cycle moved on. FBI Director James Comey’s letter about reopening the investigation into the Democratic nominee’s emails was released.
After the FBI announced there would be no charges against Hillary Clinton, Ryan issued a statement: “Regardless of this decision, the undisputed finding of the FBI’s investigation is that Secretary Clinton put our nation’s secrets at risk and in doing so compromised our national security. She simply believes she’s above the law and always plays by her own rules. … Let’s bring the Clinton era to an end by voting for Donald Trump on Tuesday.”
Trump won. Priebus became his first White House chief of staff. He is poised to accept the Republican presidential nomination for the third time next week. He is the leading candidate for the presidency nearly eight years later, which is one of the reasons Democrats are so eager to abandon Biden now.
But the NATO summit is this week. The Republican National Convention is next week, with Trump’s vice presidential pick announcement presumably coming sometime in between. Democrats are running out of time to take decisive action against Biden before their own convention in August, assuming he continues to spurn their requests that he withdraw on his own. And Biden, unlike Trump in 2016, is the sitting president.
If Biden does not like the Trump example, former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is a Democrat who took a similar approach. A blackface scandal appeared likely to end Northam’s career. But he didn’t resign. Every Democratic statewide elected official in the line of succession ended up having problems of their own, including a lieutenant governor accused of sexual assault. If they all resigned, the Republican state speaker of the house would have become governor.
All of the things Democrats can do to pressure Biden out of the race short of getting a majority of convention delegates to back another candidate — going public with concerns about his age, starving his campaign of cash, marshaling top party leaders to declare the president unfit for office or unable to win in November — have the potential for collateral damage inside the party.
If Biden does not drop out and is not removed, all these activities will only further weaken him in the general election. This was the outcome Democrats sought to avoid by not having a competitive primary process this year.
Biden and his Democratic skeptics are playing a game of chicken. The question is who will blink first.
There are important differences between Biden and Trump’s situations. The GOP’s governing class never liked Trump but he developed a strong emotional connection with the party’s base that made it difficult for the Republican establishment to move on from him. Democratic elites protected Biden from the age question until the debate called into question whether that was tenable, while rank-and-file Democrats had always been concerned about it, had hoped for other choices in the primaries, and largely settled for Biden as the nominee without much enthusiasm.
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Republicans in 2016 could plausibly hope that Trump would stop speaking like he did in the Access Hollywood tape going forward. Democrats have no such assurances that Biden will reliably perform better than he did in the first debate and the 81-year-old is likely to have more senior moments between now and the election, perhaps as soon as his press conference this week.
But if Biden wants a precedent for a presidential primary winner telling partisans calling on him to drop out to pound sand, he can find it in the man who was standing at the other podium on that fateful night in Atlanta.
