Joe Biden will “have an LBJ moment” and decide not to run for re-election next year, the leftwing academic and independent presidential candidate Cornel West has predicted.
“I’m not even sure whether I’ll be running against Biden,” West told Politico. “Biden – I think he’s going to have an LBJ moment [and] pull back.”
West was referring to the moment on 31 March 1968 when Lyndon B Johnson, in office since the assassination of John F Kennedy in November 1963, announced that he would not seek re-election.
Johnson cited the war in Vietnam and divisions at home. His former secretary, George Christian, said health was also a factor: Johnson was only 59 but had suffered a heart attack 13 years before. He had a fatal heart attack five years later.
Already the oldest president ever sworn in, Biden is 81 and would be 86 at the end of a second term. In polling, clear majorities say he is too old.
West told Politico he might end up running against a “B team” of younger Democrats including Gavin Newsom, governor of California, and Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, because Biden was “running out of gas”.
He did not mention Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice-president.
At 70, West is seven years younger than the most likely Republican candidate, the former president, 91-time criminal indictee and adjudicated rapist Donald Trump.
Trump, West said, was a “bona fide gangster, neo-fascist Pied Piper leading the country for a second civil war”.
But he called Biden “a milquetoast neoliberal with military adventurism, possibly leading the world toward world war three”.
“I’m more concerned about Trump domestically,” West said. “I’m more concerned about Biden in terms of foreign policy.”
The Biden campaign did not comment. A Trump spokesperson misspelled West’s name (“Cornell”) and said he should “go back to liberal academia instead of playing pretend politics. He still hasn’t graduated from the kids table.”
West does not perform as strongly in polling as another independent seen as a potential spoiler in favour of Trump, the attorney and campaigner Robert F Kennedy Jr.
West told Politico: “I don’t accept the spoiler category. A vote for Biden, a vote for Trump is a vote for Biden and a vote for Trump.
“There might be slices of people [who say], ‘If I didn’t vote for West, I would have voted for Biden.’ But that’s not to me a spoiler. If you’re in a race, and you make a case, and they vote for you, how do you become the spoiler?”
Polling indicates Biden’s weakness against all Republican candidates. West said he campaigned for Biden in 2020 but did not vote for him.
“When I got in there,” he said, “I don’t know if it was the Holy Ghost [but] something hit me: I said, ‘Naw, I can’t vote for this gangster.’”
West was linked to the People’s party and the Green party before becoming independent. He was, he said, “trying to touch that 38% who don’t vote at all and young people more and more wrestling with cynicism of various sorts”.
Polling shows declining support for Biden among Black voters.
West said: “If you are concerned, primarily and solely, with your president being married only one time, I’m not the one for you. And I’m certainly not the Black man for you.
“But if you’re looking at somebody who has a record that encompasses a whole host of things, politically, intellectually, over time and space, alongside my personal life then I might in fact, be somebody you consider very seriously.”
