In standing down as a candidate for President of the United States, Joe Biden has placed the interests of his country (and his party) before his own personal ambition.
I tell my students that the chief objective of any politician is to be re-elected. President Biden has demonstrated a level of courage that politicians are seldom associated with in the popular mind, by turning down the chance to achieve that prime objective.
While he did so under pressure, we must remember that this wasn’t required. It was his choice. He had the option to stubbornly plough on, to be duly nominated on the first ballot at the Chicago convention later next month, and hope for the best in the general election campaign.
While the staid wisdom of the punditocracy has Trump winning easily, I was never that certain. Battleground state polling and leading forecasting models tell us that it’s close. Fivethirtyeight.com has the probability of a Trump victory at 51% – effectively a coin flip.
We’re currently in between conventions, and Biden could have taken the Democratic nomination, and the subsequent polling bounce, and fought a campaign to his best ability.
But his ability is perceived as the problem. His campaign team rolled the dice on an early debate, last month, hoping to silence criticisms about his age, but the gamble ricocheted back on them. In the view of many, this only confirmed critiques around Biden’s age, and cast a shadow his campaign found it impossible to escape.
Only twice in modern times has a sitting president stood down in an election year; Harry Truman in 1952, and Lyndon Johnson in 1968. Both were Democrats, and both times the Democrats lost. But in endorsing Vice President Harris, Biden has warded off a potentially chaotic, contested convention which many believe torpedoed the chances of Democrats in 1968. That convention was also held in Chicago. Kamala Harris goes into this Chicago convention as the presumptive nominee, presumably with a unified Democratic Party behind her.
Given that the Republican nominee has a track record of disdain for the institutions of liberal democracy (and the rule-bound international order), many see this not only as a fight of Democrat versus Republican, but rather democracy itself against a creeping authoritarianism. President Biden himself may have seen his continuing on as a liability in that fight, and took one not only for the team but, in standing aside, has taken one for the nation too.
