Debate Debacle: Biden Should Withdraw

June 28, 2024

Watching the debate, I thought that if I were a blank slate, without background knowledge and understanding, I’d vote for Trump. Tragically, that does largely characterize too many voters.

The Biden team wanted this debate. Cockily threw down the gauntlet. What were they thinking?

I forced myself to watch, dreading a train-wreck. Because of what I’ve written about as the power imbalance between good and evil. Good people are constrained by ethics and scruples, bad people are not. So unlike Biden, Trump could say anything. Anything.

Enabled by the debate rules, barring the moderators from fact checking. The Biden team agreed to this. What were they thinking?

That Biden himself would counter every Trump lie? Mission impossible, which not even Superman could accomplish. While Biden proved himself no superman.

And so Trump spun out a whole absurdist alternate reality, practically unchallenged. Not until near midnight did CNN’s fact checker roll out the long list of lies. In that department, Trump outdid himself (however seemingly improbable). Like, on January 6, he’d offered Speaker Pelosi 10,000 troops to secure the Capitol, and she refused? And later she took responsibility for the mayhem? You couldn’t make this stuff up. (Well, Trump could.)

Meantime, the Biden-prescribed debate rules also kept Trump from being his own worst enemy, preventing him from running derangedly at the mouth. So he almost seemed coherent and not a sick harpy. But especially disgraceful in the debate was the near-invisibility of the truth about January 6 and Trump’s coup attempt. The damning words “fake electors” were never heard. Nor was Trump quoted saying he’d be a dictator on Day One.

But Trump was not even the main story. Biden was. Within minutes of the opening, it was game over. I won’t reprise what you’ve already been hearing ad nauseam. But this may actually have been helpfully clarifying. Despite some leading Democrats and Biden himself valiantly trying to stand fast, there’s no denying what we saw on that debate stage.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men,” Shakespeare wrote. So it might seem in contemporary America. The 2020 election, and the immediate reaction to January 6 may have been fleeting intermissions, with the dominant tide afterward powerfully recrudescing, as Trump, for all his crimes, went from strength to strength, like some irresistible force. And it’s an irony that Trump’s debate shtick was so full of talk about American decline — when he himself is an avatar of national moral and civic collapse.

A tragic view of life recognizes the salience of loss, with death its ultimate embodiment. America, for a quarter millennium, represented an idealistic defiance of that. Now the implacable dark tide may at last be engulfing us. This debate debacle another almost preternaturally extreme manifestation.

Previously, my estimate of Trump’s winning odds had been rising, from about 50–50 to 75%, given that not even felony convictions seemed to dent his standing; while Biden, who’d need every vote he got in 2020, was hemorrhaging support.

Ten minutes into the debate my estimate of Biden’s November chances fell to zero (give or take, with a 3% margin of error).

My humanist book group is reading historian Jackson Lear’s Animal Spirits — tracing that concept’s salience throughout America’s story, and the depth of its human psychological appeal. Watching the debate, I couldn’t help reflecting on the relevance here of “animal spirits” propelling Trump’s appeal vis-a-vis Biden. Something the debate can only heighten.

So this should indeed be a clarifying moment. President Biden’s choice is now between a humiliating November defeat, and stepping aside for a different candidate. He originally got into this thing, in 2020, to save America from Trump. Now only his standing aside can save us from Trump. His last great service to the country.

CNN’s bipartisan discussion panel (including some savvy people like Anderson Cooper, John King, Van Jones, David Axelrod, and Abby Phillip) was pretty agreed on that view, reporting a widespread “panic” to such effect among leading Democrats erupting within minutes of the debate’s opening. But who in Biden’s inner circle can persuade him? Their being in a bubble evident from their ghastly misjudgment in welcoming this debate, given what they should have realized about how it would likely play out. And for all we saw last night, he’s still a strong willed person full of self-belief. Perhaps his wife can do the needful?

Biden can withdraw gracefully, saying that upon honest self-examination, he cannot in good conscience sign up for four more years of the world’s toughest job. And that maybe the country could benefit from putting old quarrels aside, and moving forward with a fresh start. This would have the virtue of truth and wisdom.

The Democratic party has plenty of excellent alternative candidates, like Newsom, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Landrieu, Whitmer. The primaries being over, a Biden withdrawal now would cast the choice upon the national convention delegates. This can be done. Good old fashioned politics. And then any one of those named would clean Trump’s clock.

But this scenario looks extremely unlikely. We’re cooked.