INTRODUCTION
Well it’s happened.
After a horrible debate performance last month and constant pressure from the
media, Democratic officials and Democratic campaign contributors this afternoon
Joe Biden announced that he would not seek reelection this year.
I’ve made no secret
in many of the comments sections on this site that I thought that the effort to
unseat Biden as the nominee was as much a threat to democracy as anything the
right has been doing the last several years. I thought this was a horrible idea
for many reasons, not the least of which it seemed built more on desperation
and panic than any sound electoral strategy. I also believed – and still do –
that this sets a dangerous precedent for all future political campaigns going
forward and that it will undermine trust in the primary system from this day
forward.
But while those are
very valid arguments, there is another side to it that I may not have been willing
to consider strongly at the time. That is the very real fact that the
Democratic Party was about to nominate for reelection a man who would be eighty
two when he was sworn into office should he win. Much as I do feel there is a
certain built in bigotry towards ageism in our society the fact remains one of
the biggest flaws in our political system is that, because of the lack of term
limits, elected officials can remain in Congress
well past their capacity to function mentally. We saw this play out fairly
recently in the case of Dianne Feinstein this past year before she passed away
and similar concerns have been raised about Mitch McConnell earlier this year. It
has been taken a bit too far in some circles - many believe that Sonia Sotomayor and Elena
Kagan should step down to make sure we can fill their seats on the Supreme Court
even though Sotomayor is only 70 and Kagan is not even 65 - but there has always been an argument about
when you become too old to serve the public good. Strom Thurmond and Robert
Byrd may have both held records for longevity in the Senate, but by the time
they won reelection for their eighth time there’s an argument that they were barely
functioning, certainly not as legislators.
And that applies
exponentially to whoever holds the White House. There have far too many precedents
in our history where the occupant of the White House has been either incapacitated
or in horrible physical health at critical times in our history. Considering the state of the world these days,
there is a valid argument of electing a man in his 80s to try and run for a
second term that, according to the National Census Bureau’s statistics, he may
not be able to survive. That doesn’t entirely negate so much of what happened
during the last few weeks but it has to have been a factor that the average
voter was considering the closer we came to election day.
And now that Biden
has stepped down whoever becomes the Democratic nominee will end up facing a
torrent of debate from people who hold one of these positions very strongly. In
order to win over the Democratic voters in the few months before election day,
the nominee will have to be prepared to know what’s coming and how to argue
against it.
What follows will be
two different articles framed in the nature of the debates those of us who attended
them in high school – not watching them play out on cable news. The first
article you will read will be one arguing why removing Biden from the ticket
was a move that will come to cost the Democrats in November and why the
historical record will argue very strongly that what they have done will result
in failure. The second article will give the argument for removing Biden from
the ticket for reelection, using history to give examples in which America had
a chief executive who was incapacitated physically or mentally and why it was
in the interest not only of the Democratic party but the nation as a whole for
him to be replaced and a new candidate nominated.
Full disclosure: the
first article was written yesterday when I still believed removing Biden was still
just a hypothetical. However, while the language may be somewhat harsh, I have
left it fundamentally unchanged. I suspect variations of this will follow in
the days and weeks to come as the ramifications of what has happen settle in.
And its worth noting some of these arguments were actually made on prominent
sites such as Politico before Biden decided to step down. So in that sense this
is a case of forewarned being forearmed.
There
is Some Precedent as To What Democrats
Are
Attempting to Force Biden to Do –
And
It’s the Biggest Argument Against Their Actions
The biggest problem I
have with the effort to get Biden step aside
- you know, aside from the minor ones of it being completely
undemocratic, based on panic that is not being measured in the polls and the
fact that even the people behind this attempted coup will admit in private that
they don’t have a step two if Biden actually does what they’re trying to
persuade him to do - is that I’m certain
beyond any shadow of a doubt that if it were done, it would absolutely guarantee
the result all of these panicked Democrats seem certain will happen if
Biden stays on the ticket.
Even the most devoted
followers to the idea of replacing Biden have no clear concept on how doing
this would lead to an election win in November. They will speak in the vaguest
of terms about brokered conventions and certain prominent names in the party being
put forth and basically gloss over all the other consequences as if they are
irrelevant. This should be the clearest sign of all in my opinion that all of
this is based not in reality but the possibility of Trump winning in November.
That there is absolutely no guarantee that replacing the President will achieve
the result they are after seems not to have entered their thinking at all which
is hardly surprising: its been clear to me for the last three weeks that fear
is driving the train rather than logic or reality.
No one can even come
up with a precedent where this could work. The clearest examples anyone even
can think of go back to Woodrow Wilson and FDR, and its telling the most
recent example they can come up with for a successful attempt is not only
nearly a century ago but in both cases involved the Democrats running against
an enormously unpopular Republican. Even then Taft very well might have
won reelection against Wilson had it not been for TR splitting the Republican
Party and Hoover was so unpopular that any Democrat very likely would have
defeated him in 1932.
But while there is no
history on point where it would work even in the distant past, there are
several examples in the relatively recent past which are parallel to this and
clearly demonstrate not only the risks of doing what is being suggested but
show very clear that the possibilities of success are next to non-existent.
There’s a very clear irony to this fact as to the people who are aware of this
history, but I’m going to save that spoiler until the end. (Note: I’ve written
in greater detail about these events in many of my previous articles, so I’ll
try to keep the summaries to a minimum.)
In March of 1968 a
near defeat by Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary convinced Lyndon
Johnson that he could not win reelection. He would name as his successor his
Vice President Hubert Humphrey. While McCarthy and Robert Kennedy fought it out
in the Democratic primaries, Humphrey spent much of those same months getting
commitments from delegates from state party bosses. On the night of Robert
Kennedy’s assassination even his managers had acknowledged to themselves that
Humphrey was on the verge of clinching the needed delegates.
The dissent between
Humphrey as the establishment and the McCarthy-Kennedy delegation came to a
fever-pitch in Chicago in August both on the convention floor and outside. The
public images of the heated arguments inside the hall as the coalition failed to
stopped Humphrey from earning the nomination combined with the images of
students being beaten and gassed by police outside wounded Humphrey even before
the fall campaign began. He spent the next two months trying his hardest to
walk a balance between the policies of the current President and the student
protestors who were irrevocably against him. McCarthy essentially took a walk
during the fall campaign and never did much more than lukewarmly endorse his
fellow Minnesotan.
With all that
Humphrey came within one percent of the popular vote of beating Richard Nixon
on election day. In the endless autopsies at the time and historically, there
were clearly many reasons behind Humphrey’s narrow loss. One of the most
critical reasons was that Humphrey never found a way to truly unify the party.
He was hoping that the mere fear of a man that they all loathed – Richard Nixon
– gaining the White House would be enough to get the disparate coalitions of Democrats
to unite. It clearly wasn’t.
Four years later with
the Vietnam War still raging George McGovern, who had been a stand-in for the
Kennedy forces in Chicago, began what was considered a long-shot run for the
Democratic nomination in the primaries. It was clear from the start that the grass
roots work he had done was something that the establishment candidates, among
them the early front runner Edmund Muskie and later Humphrey himself – were
unprepared for. Led by his campaign manager Gary Hart, McGovern managed a
guerilla style takeover that led to him winning an overwhelming number of
delegates in the Democratic primaries.
The establishment did
everything they could stop him during the convention at Miami as McGovern’s
view were considered far too leftist to win against Nixon in November. McGovern
had hoped his victories in the primaries would lead to the establishment
uniting around him to beat Nixon. This was unlikely given the primary path but
it became impossible during the convention itself.
The victories of the
McGovern coalition were so complete that they did everything in their power to
stop having the figures in the Democratic leadership for decades, such as Larry
O’Brien and Pierre Salinger, have any role in the campaign to elect McGovern
going forward. A battle to guarantee a victory for McGovern on the first ballot
isolated part of his own coalition. But whatever slim chance McGovern had for
victory in the fall got completely shot the hell when it came to trying to
selecting his Vice Presidential candidate.
The process was
chaotic from the start with far too many cooks. It seemed like it was going to
be Mayor Kevin White of Boston but when Ted Kennedy vetoed the idea, he was
gone. Eventually the selection came to the Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri
– from the Midwest and a Catholic, the party thought he would balance the
ticket. There were rumors that Eagleton had suffered from depression but no one
thought it a disqualifier. McGovern picked Eagleton as his running mate.
However almost within
hours of the selection, reporters seized on the story of Eagleton’s depression
as well as the fact that he’d undergone what was then known as shock therapy. Fears
of Eagleton’s mental health soon became part of the story as well as immense
pressure to remove Eagleton from the ticket. McGovern stood by him, saying at
one point he was: “one thousand percent behind Tom Eagleton.” But within a day
of this he began having second thoughts and starting trying to force Eagleton
to step down. Eagleton put up a fight and the conflict also balloon.
Finally after
eighteen days, Eagleton either voluntarily or was forced to step down from the
ticket. There was another long panicked rush for a replacement, even more
panicked than the initial search. Finally McGovern chose Sargent Shriver, the
former head of Peace Corps and an in-law to the Kennedy family. But by that
point the damage to McGovern’s reputation among the public and the Democratic
leadership was irrevocable. McGovern and his campaign forces looked both
incompetent and uncaring in their handling of the Eagleton affair and their
party platform was too far to the left for most Democrats and most Americans.
McGovern was nineteen points down in the polls even before the Republicans met.
Nixon easily won
reelection, carrying 49 of 50 states. Not even McGovern’s attempt to publicize
the Watergate break-in did anything to help his bid against Nixon. It was not
until after the Senate investigations began in earnest that Nixon’s presidency
began to crumble. He was not helped when his vice president Spiro Agnew was
undergoing a separate indictment for corruption in his former home state of
Maryland. Agnew was forced to resign in October of 1973. Using the 25th
Amendment, Nixon nominated House Minority Leader Gerald Ford to fill the
office. Ford was confirmed two months later and Nixon resigned in disgrace on
August 8th 1974.
Because Ford had not
been elected either President or Vice-President, Ronald Reagan whose term as
governor of California had ended not long after Ford assumed office, thought
there were legitimate grounds to challenge him in the Republican primary in 1976.
The two men would spend almost all of 1976 engaged in a battle in the
Republican primaries for the Presidential nomination.
When they ended in
June with neither men having the required number of delegates both Ford and
Reagan engaged in multiple stratagems to win over the uncommitted. Reagan’s
attempt to shock the convention by choosing Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania
as his running mate – thus moving delegates from the Northeast to him –
backfired as delegates from the South, particularly Mississippi, moved to Ford.
Ford narrowly won renomination on the first ballot.
At one point during
the summer Ford was trailing the Democratic nominee for President, the one-term
governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter, in the polls by 38 points. By the end of the campaign
Ford had turned the race into a dead heat. On election day Carter managed a
narrow victory with 297 electoral votes to Ford’s 240. Carter won by more than
a million and a half in the popular vote, but if less than thirty-thousand
votes in Ohio and Mississippi had gone to Ford instead of Carter, Ford would
have won election to the Presidency in his own right.
Again there were many
factors that led to Ford’s defeat in November but it is worth noting that the
die-hard Reagan followers – and indeed many in Reagan’s campaign itself –
either sat on their hands during the fall campaign or chose to stay at home on
election day. Many wanted Reagan to run for the Presidency in 1980 and if a
Democrat was in the White House, it would be infinitely easier for Reagan to
win then if an incumbent Republican –
particularly one so diametrically opposite to Reagan in all measure of policy –
was President.
Carter’s presidency
was, of course, plagued by stagflation, high interest rates, oil boycotts and
many example of poor leadership. As early as 1979 many members of the
Democratic Party thought Carter’s attempt to win reelection were doomed and
were turning to Ted Kennedy to run for the Democratic nomination in 1980. That
Kennedy was a deeply flawed candidate in his own right – Chappaquiddick being
the biggest problem - mattered less
than disapproval of Carter and the restoration of Kennedy.
The Iran hostage
crisis in 1979 help solidify support for Carter. But Kennedy from the start
proved inadequate to the measures of candidacy. An interview with Roger Mudd
shows him unable to answer questions about his marriage, Chappaquiddick or even
why he wanted to be President in the first place. The primary campaign was a
disaster at the start with Carter refusing to debate and Kennedy being terrible
on the stump. He was destroyed in the early primaries and a rebound in many
later states did nothing to stop the fact that Carter had the nomination locked
up.
Kennedy, however, did
not concede. He called for an ‘open convention’, something the Carter faction
did everything to stop. Many within the Democrats were still trying to find an
alternative, if not Kennedy, then perhaps Henry Jackson or Muskie. Carter
managed to beat off all comers and clinched the nomination on the first ballot.
But when Kennedy gave
a speech conceding on the convention floor in Madison Square Garden, he
galvanized the crowd in a way nothing else did. Carter’s acceptance speech was
stilted and messy. And when Carter asked Kennedy to join him on the convention
floor in a gesture of unity, the cameras famously caught Kennedy avoiding
Carter on the stage for nearly fifteen minutes. The idea of the party coming
together was smashed that night for Carter, and he was never able to accomplish
it. It’s unlikely Carter could have beaten Reagan for the Presidency that year
– by the time of the primary campaign started most thought he would be a
one-term President – but the inability of the party to unify around its
President was a factor that can’t be denied.
In four consecutive
elections one of the Presidential parties either replaced or attempted to
replace one of the nominees for President or Vice-President. In all four of
those cases the chaos and disharmony was so apparent - and in all cases played out on TV – that the party never was
able to overcome its appearance of either incompetence or unify the party. In
all four cases the party they were running against won in November. In two of
those case, this disharmony may have been the deciding factor in a close
election and while one can’t say this given the results in Reagan’s victory in
1980, the polls showed a dead heat between Carter and Reagan until the final
days.
And these events are
very much in the memory of so many people who are still alive as well as
several major political figures who were involved in some extent. One of them,
of course, was Joe Biden. I’m not certain of how deeply he was involved
in politics in 1968 but he was running for the Senate for the first time in
1972 which means he would likely have been at the Miami Convention in some
form. He won his seat in the Senate even as McGovern lost Delaware in a
landslide.
He would have been
part of the Delaware delegation at the convention that nominated Carter for
President in 1976 and would have noted every detail of the fight between Reagan
and Ford to see how it would have affected the chances of Carter in November. He
would have been avidly campaigning for Carter in the fall and no doubt happy
his home state went for Carter on election day. (It was only 3 electoral votes
but that year Carter needed them more than many candidates do.)
And it was Biden who
went to the Oval Office in early 1979 to tell Carter that Ted Kennedy was
considering a primary challenge to the sitting President. I don’t know what
kind of advice he could have given him as Senator who’d only recently been
reelected for the first time but I have little doubt Carter would have
appreciated the loyalty at a time when many Democrats had doubts in him. Biden
remained loyal to Carter during the long campaign that followed but he must
have known from past experience how damaging the primary battle would be to the
incumbent in the fall. And it was. Reagan carried 44 states including Biden’s
Delaware.
For all the arguments
about the ‘geritocracy’ in American politics, the fact remains its like they
say in the insurance ads: “they know a thing or two because they’ve seen a
thing or two.” Bernie Sanders, for example, has seen what happens when this
plays out and that is why he has been fully for Biden despite the left’s
argument to reject him. Nancy Pelosi has seen this, even if she wasn’t in
elected office for much of it. Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley, John Corbyn and
Dick Durbin all saw this play out on their TVs over the years and were no doubt
affected by it before they came into politics.
Many of the
participants or key observers in the above events I’ve described are still
alive as well. Gary Hart is still alive, as is Pat Buchanan (who knows
something about primary challenges himself). Dick Cheney was Gerald Ford’s
chief of staff and had to help run his primary campaign against Reagan. Peggy
Noonan must have known about this from Reagan’s campaigns and the fact that’s
she advocating for Biden to be removed as a plus is a sign of her own
foolishness. And no matter what you think of Robert Kennedy Jr., he has seen
and lived through the effects of much of what happened.
All of these men and
women know the common thread behind everything that happened: they know that in
any presidential election year, it is essential that your party remain unified.
Party unity may not necessarily win an election but party disunion will
assuredly cause you to lose it.
Over the last decade
there has been so much written and said by the media, by Democrats, by
progressives about why on earth the Republican Party is loyal to Donald Trump
when he is not loyal to them. The problem, I now belief, is that everyone is
asking the question the wrong way. It may not make sense from a moral
perspective or even a logical one but from a purely political perspective, it
makes perfect sense.
The Republican party, one and all, is loyal to
Donald Trump because they want to win elections and take power in the White
House and the halls of Congress. The Republicans have, for the record, been
equally loyal to as questionable leaders throughout their recent history –
Richard Nixon was as monstrous as Trump if not more so, and Reagan’s competency
was questioned by even his fellow Republicans for many years – but they stayed
loyal to them and never aired their doubts for a simple reason: they wanted to
be in power. They wanted to walk in the corridors of power and bend the country
it’s too will. Democrats want to do the exact same thing, for the record. They
might say they want to do good with the power; they might even mean it, but
that doesn’t mean they don’t want to win elections as badly as Republicans do,
if not more so.
But the difference
has been for as long as I can remember and in many of the examples I’ve given
below, the Democratic party has fundamentally had more trouble unifying the
many ideological groups among its coalition in order to get that blessed thing
called unity. This is in large part of so many of these leftist groups who
think it is more important that a kind of moral relativism that applies to
their needs alone is more important than winning power. The many factors of the
last twenty years – social media the most prominent – has argued against the
idea of unity in anything, politics being the least of it. Over the 21st
century the unity of the GOP may have hurt them morally and reduced them to
little more than a cult of personality. But they still fundamentally understand
what the media, progressives and many current elected Democrats just don’t.
Unity helps a political party win elections. Chaos helps the opposition win.
Joe Biden knows
better than almost any other person alive, certainly in the political power
structure, this basic fact. The party he has been a proud member of and has
served in every capacity for more than half a century has been the victim of
lack of unity more times than he can remember. For the last three years as he
became the leader of the Democratic Party, he’s become the target of so much
disunity from almost every faction of it. And now part of it has turned against
him, not because his policies have failed, like they did with LBJ, or because
he was immensely unpopular, like Carter was at the low point of his Presidency,
but because they just don’t think he can win reelection. The previous
challengers at least had someone they wanted to replace him with; this group
doesn’t even have that. I have no doubt he could – and probably has – told
anyone who would listen that this will just bring about the very result they’re
trying to prevent. That used to be enough to matter in the party Joe Biden has
been a part of all his life. The fact that it doesn’t seem to makes me even
more afraid of the future of the Democratic party then whatever possibility
there is of the Republicans returning to the White House in November.
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