Biden's decision

How it feels to make the only choice available. Again.

“Although it’s awfully clear to me what choice I have to make, I have to tell you honestly, I do it with incredible reluctance — and it makes me angry,” Joe Biden said.

No, not today. This is what he said in Washington on Sept. 24, 1987, the first time he abandoned a presidential election campaign while it was underway.

“I’m angry with myself for having been put in the position — for having put myself in the position — of having to make this choice,” he said then. “And I am no less frustrated at the environment of Presidential politics that makes it so difficult to let the American people measure the whole Joe Biden, and not just misstatements that I have made.”

That first time, Biden was a moderately impressive 44-year-old Senator from Delaware whose formal campaign had lasted about three months. He had been caught plagiarizing a speech by UK Labour leader Neil Kinnock, cribbing other speeches from John and Bobby Kennedy, and improperly attributing a source in a law-school essay.

Then as now, Biden tried to tough it out, to substitute his own iron belief in himself for the flagging faith of his followers. Then as now, it didn’t work, partly because the people and institutions that personified American power had decided he was no longer qualified.

“Jill was on his left, close, her right arm almost touching him,” Richard Ben Cramer wrote in his mighty parallel biography of six of the candidates in the 1988 race, What It Takes. “She stared straight ahead at the wall of cameras, the pack… but she met no one’s eyes. She hated them. First time in her life … but it was true: this was hate. They were destroying what Joe worked for, twenty years. It was just another story for them.”

There have been reports that as he felt himself being forced into the decision he announced on Sunday, Biden felt flashes of the same anger for the same reason. Anger at the party brass, the strategists and hangers-on and donors — “that crowd of party hacks,” Cramer called them, “who’d heard a million speeches, who didn’t give a shit…” At the press gallery. At the fancy Dems who went to better schools than scrappy Joey Biden’s Delaware U and Syracuse Law, the swells who’d been baptized in what Biden called America’s “river of power.”

The feeling came back again in 2016, when Biden was the loyal two-term vice president to a popular president but was simply elbowed aside by the river-of-power types, by Barack Obama (Harvard Law) and Hillary Clinton (Yale Law) and Bill Clinton (Yale Law). “Railroaded by people to whom he had been nothing but loyal for years,” as the New York Times article by Michael D. Shear (Harvard Kennedy School) put it.

I should emphasize here that I’m trying to imagine how this feels to Biden, not to approximate the judgment of history. There’s an important, indeed decisive, way that 2024 is different from 1987 or 2016, and it’s that Joe Biden is 37 years older than he was the first time and 8 long, hard years older than he was the second. It shows. Twenty-four days elapsed between the catastrophic CNN debate and Biden’s surrender. Perhaps only Biden could have lasted even that long. (I’m quoting Cramer a lot, but what the heck: “There was (to be perfectly blunt, as Joe would say) a breathtaking element of balls,” Cramer wrote, summing up not only that first failed bid but a life entire. “Joe Biden had balls. Lots of times, more balls than sense. This was from the jump — as a little kid.”) The Democratic Party and the East Coast nomenklatura didn’t withdraw their support because they find him uncouth or because he never got into Skull and Bones, but because they are hoping to save their Republic and because they lost their faith, all at once, that he is up to the job or even entirely aware of his surroundings.

Spare a thought for Robert Hur, the Republican-voting special counsel who, less than five months ago, called Biden “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” in the report of his investigation into Biden’s possession of classified documents after he left the Obama White House. Transcripts of Biden’s testimony cast doubt on Hur’s description, but surely it now stands as one of the year’s milder assessments of the incumbent’s abilities.

I’m sad today. At some point during the Obama presidency, I decided I liked Joe Biden, and that has never stopped. Getting old sucks. It will visit its share of indignities on us all. But most of us won’t have the world watching while we make our last decisions.

In particular, I have no confidence that by withdrawing, Biden is improving his party’s chances of keeping the White House. Vice-President Kamala Harris, now the likely nominee, has lately outpolled Biden by a nose. We’ll see. Incumbency is a powerful asset in politics, and Harris has a tiny fraction of Biden’s stock. She was not a formidable candidate in 2020. She will not always be helped by people who think they are helping. The White House’s message people will tell themselves they finally have a candidate they can script. Democrats who were always vaguely embarrassed by Biden — Scranton, Wilmington, Claymont, Syracuse, are you kidding me — will be eager to get down to the work that gives them the greatest joy, which is correcting Americans’ thoughts.

Many will say: Yes, but Trump. Yes, but Trump is twice impeached and thirty-odd times convicted, and Jan. 6, and the rest. All true. Yes — but Trump’s vote will come out. I make no prediction about how this ends. I could not have predicted any part of the last month.

In 2017, Biden published a memoir about his son Beau’s 2015 death from cancer. He launched a national tour to promote the book. It was so transparently an exploratory tour for a presidential candidacy that I decided to attend the tour’s first event, at Lincoln Center in New York City. Stephen Colbert interviewed him on the stage of Geffen Hall.

Reading the column that resulted, I see I didn’t tip my hand much about how all this made me feel. I didn’t much like it. Mourning and ambition were too tightly bound up in Joe Biden’s thoughts. He didn’t seem clear in his own head about his motivation. I didn’t think it would end well for him. I worried.

Turns out he still had some surprises left in him. He managed to get elected president and has been a consequential one. He became president at a time of crisis, and much of the crisis persists. It must be so hard to leave the field now. But now, seeing everything we’ve seen since 1987, it is easier for the rest of us to measure the whole Joe Biden.