Now ends our summer of discontent. Nearly half of Democrats fretfully tell pollsters that President Biden is “too old”. Fifty-eight per cent of all Americans, including 30% of Democrats, do not approve of his handling of the economy. Twenty-one per cent of Democrats rate him unfavorably. If these discontented were to change their opinion, his favorability would be near or above 50%. Depressed Democrats hold down his standing.
Biden returns from the G20 economic conference in India triumphant, conducting complex diplomacy edging out China, and heralding a host of deliverables, notably a deal to build a rail and shipping network from India to Europe and the Middle East, running through Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, a “game-changing regional investment”, he declares. He follows with an unprecedented pact with Vietnam as a strategic partner. Then at his press conference he wanders into a monologue about a John Wayne western and one of Biden’s favored expressions, “a lying dog-faced pony soldier”, to refer to disbelievers in the climate crisis.
Biden gets no credit for his accomplishments. The Axios newsletter reports that he and Trump “are running dueling basement campaigns that make them look like they are in the witness protection program”. Actual events and policies are dismissed. The formulaic repetition of false equivalence, put forward as “balance”, prevails as conventional wisdom.
All summer, the Biden administration touts his extraordinary achievements – his infrastructure bill, his Inflation Reduction Act, his Chips and Science Act. Political action committees launch a $13m advertising campaign documenting the revival of manufacturing. Yet the poll numbers are unmoved. “These are DARK DAYS in the life of America!” posts Donald Trump on his Truth Social account. He is more or less even with Biden. With every indictment, he rises further above his inconsequential rivals for the Republican nomination.
On their panoply of “weaponization” committees of the House of Representatives, Republicans play Inspector Clouseau as Javert, pursuing Biden as the diabolic boss of a crime family, his son Hunter Biden and his peccadilloes an instrument for prying the door to reveal the hidden Godfather. The fantasy gangster, Trump’s doppelganger, distracts from the indicted one. On Fox News, Biden is also the enfeebled, doddering and senile fool on his last legs. Which is the ruse? Fifty-five per cent of Republicans in swing House districts believe Biden should be impeached even if there is “no evidence”. The poll did not offer the category of spectral evidence that was accepted in the Salem witch trials. Under pressure from the far-right House caucus that holds the Sword of Damocles over his head, speaker Kevin McCarthy announced the opening of an impeachment panel to conjure the works of the devil’s magic.
But it is the Democrats who pull Biden underwater. They see his physical faults and shudder at his political fall. He is 80, his hair thinned, his gait slower and more careful. He is not eloquent. The slight hesitation of the stutter he overcame as a child seems occasionally to return. He is not Mick Jagger strutting at 80. The intensity of concern among Democrats about Biden is in direct proportion to their panic about Trump. They see in his fragility their own predicament. He is the screen on which they project their anxiety, insecurity and fear. They suffer from a crisis of bad nerves.
The Democrats’ withholding creates a self-fulfilling prophesy. Spooked by the shadow of Trump, they react with disapproval of Biden, whose numbers are stagnant, flashing the sign that makes them more frightened. They do not censure Biden or dislike him. But they hope for a counter-factual scenario. There is none.
Asked to name a specific person they would prefer to Biden, 18% of Democrats replied with a scattering of names. Bernie Sanders, 82, received the highest support at 3%. Sanders, who has twice run for the nomination, this time has early endorsed Biden. It has taken the democratic socialist to remind that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.
If Biden were not to run, the counter-factual dream of a Hollywood ending with Michael Douglas from The American President materializing would be replaced with a ferocious primary of centrifugal force exposing the party’s fractured divides and the survivor most likely at no better rating than Biden at the current fraught moment. Biden’s presence leaves that bloodsport to another day.
Rather than the counter-factual hypothesis, there are a number of factual realities. This older Biden, to those who have known him over the decades, is a more capable Biden than the younger Biden. That earlier incarnation was more impetuous, garrulous and conventional. He was always, though, a natural tactile politician, the senator from a state like a congressional district, with an open and caring touch, appearing at a 1,001 gatherings.
But he also carried a streak of insecurity, of being a son of the middle class, a middling student from the University of Delaware, and not from an Ivy League school. That self-doubt flared in self-undermining displays, abruptly ending his first campaign when he plagiarized speeches from Robert F Kennedy and the British Labour leader Neil Kinnock.
Biden’s judgment is not attributable to an abstract and amorphous category called “experience”, but rather particular concrete experiences, beyond bearing the weight of his unimaginable personal tragedies. His defeats and missteps, slights and belittlement, have accumulated on to the years of committee chairmanships, a lifetime in the Senate like no other president since Lyndon Johnson and the whole range of being vice-president involved in every major decision of the executive during the Obama administration.
In the Senate, Biden surrounded himself with the most talented staff. He was not that insecure. As president, at the head of a vast government, his cabinet is an array of highly effective people. There has not been a single major scandal among them after the most corrupt administration in American history. The paradox of Biden’s poll numbers among Democrats is that there is no complaint about how he runs the government.
The further paradox is that there is no movement to supplant Biden. There is no faction of the party that seeks to remove him. There is no group within the Congress that seeks to topple him. There is no credible person running against him or contemplating a campaign against him. There is no king across the sea. There is no Bonnie Prince Charlie ready to invade. There are no pretenders to the throne. There is none of that. The poll numbers as a party matter are hollow.
And there is no rightful Kennedy succession to overthrow the second Irish Catholic president. After President John F Kennedy’s assassination, two Kennedys ran against incumbent Democratic presidents whom they somehow regarded as interlopers, Robert F Kennedy against Lyndon Johnson and Edward M Kennedy against Jimmy Carter. Robert F Kennedy Jr’s entry now is not a case of the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, but simply pathos.
Of Robert F Kennedy Jr, a subject Democrats fervently do not want to discuss, in truth the feeling is the opposite of loathing for his spiraling descent into ever more baroque conspiracy theories, but instead profound sadness at the public display of his affliction. He rattles off barrages of science fiction and prejudice with an air of mastery of arcane knowledge that only persuades listeners that he is the sufferer of a disorder. For example, he offered, “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
There are no actual Democrats who view Kennedy as a political figure, representing a valid position that must be heard within the party, but a collateral victim of the tragedy of his father and uncle. His shoulder-rubbing with the Trump scum, Bannon and Flynn and Stone, his pocketing of funds from the Silicon Valley PayPal Mafia that also finances Ron DeSantis, and his insults hurled at Biden arouse a mixture of horror and sorrow. He states his identity is that of a recovering addict, claiming, “I was born an addict,” but his “candidacy” is less a campaign than a breakout from recovery. His wretchedness is a continual sight of dreadful infirmity. He threatens only himself. He inspires dismay and grief. His family members are beside themselves. Democrats wish to avert their gaze.
The counter-factual scenario the Republicans originally pressed about Biden is the return of a cycle of failure. Four months into his administration, Congressman Jim Jordan, the Republican from Ohio, tweeted, “Joe Biden is the new Jimmy Carter.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page has periodically revived the trope, laying out its dream that another Ronald Reagan will appear as in 1980. “Will Mr. Biden suffer a similar fate?” wrote one of its columnists. “His agenda is creating a similar backlash. … The conservative movement has another chance to recapture the imagination of a malaise-beset public.”
When Carter entered office in 1977, the inflation rate was 6.5%. Under the energy shocks of ruthless Opec oil price rises and the Iranian revolution, from January 1979 to December 1980, inflation in that period spiked 23% to a 13.5% rate total. In the summer of 1979, a gasoline shortage caused long lines at the pumps. On 15 July, Carter delivered a speech proclaiming a “crisis of confidence”, the need for “sacrifice”, and a “rebirth” of “our common faith”. Two days later, he scuttled his message, firing five cabinet members, which appeared to prove the lack of confidence in the government. By October, his favorability fell to 29%.
The Democratic leadership in the Congress disliked the cold technocrat in the White House. Their favorite son, Ted Kennedy, topped Carter by 59% to 19% in an October poll in New Hampshire, the first primary state. Kennedy declared his candidacy on 7 November, three days after US diplomats were seized as hostages in Tehran. Carter defeated Kennedy in New Hampshire by 11 points. The split party served the cause of Reagan and encouraged the entrance of a third candidate, the liberal Republican John Anderson.
The inflation that stoked those politics is not comparable to the inflation today. Driven largely by the distortions of supply and demand caused by the Covid crisis, recent inflation at its peak was less than half that of the Carter presidency. This year, from January to July, inflation went up only 1.9%, a greatly slowed rate, now hovering at around 3% total, and declining. Unlike in the 1970s, inflationary expectations are shifting strongly downward. Economic conditions that underlay the fall of Carter and rise of Reagan are fast receding. The analogy does not hold. Only a reflexively sado-monetarist Federal Reserve that insists on continuing to raise interest rates in order to slam the brakes on growth could create a moral hazard.
Yet the political value of Biden’s successes remains diminished for another reason. His team attempts to persuade by operating on the tried-and-true premise that the election is a referendum on the incumbent. But in public perception Biden is not the only incumbent running. Sixty-nine per cent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe that Trump won the 2020 election and Biden is an illegitimate president, according to an August CNN poll. Trump will be the Republican candidate running as the true incumbent in the eyes of the majority of his party.
The only previous cases of defeated presidents running again for the office were Grover Cleveland, who won in 1884, Martin Van Buren, losing in 1848 on the Free Soil Party, and Millard Fillmore, losing in 1856 on the Know Nothing or American Party. Cleveland never claimed to have really won when he was defeated in 1888; nor did Van Buren in 1840. Vice-President Fillmore had acceded to the presidency in 1850 after the death of Zachary Taylor. He was not his party’s nominee in 1852. Trump again has no precedent.
The election of 2024 will be the second referendum on Trump, but the first held on the attempted coup of January 6. Just as the 2004 election, which President George W Bush won, was in effect a referendum on the terrorist attack on September 11, the only election since 1988 in which the Republican won the popular vote, January 6 is the overwhelming political factor that establishes Trump’s assertion to his party’s nomination by means of incumbency. His forthcoming trials are not peripheral, but central to his claim.
When the illusion of a counter-factual alternative fades, and the choice is between the incumbent and the false incumbent, then Democrats may consider something other than the age of Biden and whether they wish to contribute to a new political age of Trump.
Sidney Blumenthal is the author of The Permanent Campaign, published in 1980, and All the Power of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln 1856-1860, the third of a projected five volumes. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton
