Prospect Live Weekly Roundup: The Biden Question

Because Democrats are essentially manic depressives who want better health care options for people, the question of whether Joe Biden should step down from the presidential race for … well, someone … has dominated the news of the last several days. The rumblings about his age and capacity for campaigning have been in the air for weeks, but Ezra Klein and Nate Silver laying down this marker has inspired more public debate. And the discussion is not going anywhere, with presidential defenders and Biden campaign operatives lining up with familiar opposition.

As it happens, Klein’s podcast about replacing Biden came out just as I was preparing for the Prospect’s first weekly news roundup, a live YouTube show that we are running on Fridays. We’re going to do this every week at our YouTube channel, and it’s an opportunity to jump in on important conversations in policy and politics, and answer questions from readers. Because I riffed for the first 20 minutes about Klein’s argument and why I’m unpersuaded by it, I thought I’d share it with readers today. You can watch the segment below, and a rough transcript of it follows.

The thing I would add to this is that the changes that Biden has initiated on political-economy questions—antitrust, trade, industrial policy—are new and highly contingent, and are not destined to remain the Democratic position by any means. By pushing aside these policy matters and putting the hopes of the future on whoever subjectively sounds good in a speech, it increases the possibility that these shifts in policy positions were just a moment in time.

There are real problems with Biden’s campaign; he can’t seem to articulate his record, and as I allude to in the segment, the core problem may have more to do with an LBJ style of being dragged down by a tragic and increasingly unpopular foreign-policy stance. But even with that, polls show consistently him performing best against Trump out of all challengers, and the food fight of a top-down replacement process, passing over the next-in-line Black woman in favor of a free-for-all no less, could not possibly be more divisive.

But I’m preempting my own argument, made on the fly in our weekly roundup. I invite you to join us every Friday, and here’s what you can expect.

Transcript

The first thing I really want to talk about was actually somebody else’s podcast. You might have seen today, Ezra Klein came out with this 25-minute podcast calling for Joe Biden to step down. I think this elevates to a level, to me it’s similar to what happened in 2019 when The New York Times and Siena came out with a poll. At the time, Elizabeth Warren was the front-runner in the Democratic primary, and this poll showed her losing to Donald Trump. And that turned everyone kind of on a dime, that we’re going to have to find another consensus candidate. There’s something about the Times that really influences elite opinion, unsurprisingly, and having one of their more important opinion columnists come out and say there’s something here that is not working, and people are going to have to go to Biden and consider getting him to step down, I think is going to move elite opinion in a very particular way. We’re going to start seeing a drumbeat of this. There were hints of this with a very celebrated debut, return of Jon Stewart to The Daily Show and his opening monologue about the age question. Ezra pretty much focused entirely on the age question when talking about whether Biden is up to the rigors of a campaign and proving to people that he has the ability to continue for another four years, to defend his record, things of that nature. Ezra said, you just look at Biden in the past campaign and in previous years to today and there’s no comparison.

I think about the fact that there’s one fleeting reference to Gaza in Ezra’s entire argument. And I think that’s a giant missing link to thinking about the nature of this campaign right now. Because his claim is that we’ve had remarkably consistent polling. We’ve seen inflation go down while 13 million jobs have been created and it hasn’t moved anything. The last six months, inflation has been at the Federal Reserve’s target, the economy has been doing very well, job growth is great, people even in economic sentiment are seeing their personal economic situation and the situation of the overall economy as improved, and that hasn’t changed the trajectory of Biden’s numbers. And so you can make one version of this argument that says, well the problem is Biden, the problem is what he looks like, how he conducts himself on the campaign trail, etc. But I think not taking into account what has happened since October 7, it misses the fact that I think there are shifts in this electorate. Some people may have come back to Biden after the economy has done well but others have fallen out over this situation. And I feel like the issue of what’s happening in the Middle East and the issue of Biden’s age actually are working in concert. It looks feeble to have these constant behind-the-scenes stories that Biden is very unhappy with Netanyahu, he doesn’t want Israel to continue this indiscriminate bombing campaign. And then Israel continues to do what it wants. It plays into this aspect that Biden may not be up to the task. Even though I don’t think that the two are necessarily completely related. Certainly Joe Biden, despite this litany of behind-the-scenes stories, has done nothing to suggest publicly that he’s going to hold Israel accountable in any way for the actions that they have taken. So I don’t know that this is actually an age kind of situation, or significant of him not being able to handle things on the world stage. But I do think they’re somewhat complementary. They seem to lead people to the same conclusion. And if we see changes in the administration’s posture over the next month on this issue, if we see the Uncommitted campaign in Michigan really get significant traction, and we see a large critical mass of people saying, no this is the problem. The problem is that you’re engaging in a policy of standing with the Israeli government in a campaign of indiscriminate slaughter. No that is the problem. The problem isn’t that you’re 81 years old and going to be 86 by the end of your [second] term. The problem is that you’re not following the wishes of the Democratic base and the American people on this particular issue which has taken on a great deal of significance. I think that needs to be part of the consideration.

The other things that come to mind in thinking about this, two states have already voted in this primary. And they have voted in resounding numbers for Joe Biden, even when he wasn’t on the ballot. They voted [for Biden] as a write-in candidate in a dramatically large fashion in New Hampshire, despite not appearing in New Hampshire at any point during the campaign, despite another candidate who was kind of a generic replacement candidate in Dean Phillips basically living in New Hampshire for three months or however long he was in the race. He still lost to someone who wasn’t even on the ballot by resounding numbers. And in South Carolina you see Saddam Hussein–type numbers for Joe Biden. Do their views, the views of the people who went out to the polls in those two states, and who will go out to the polls in the other states matter? That’s why this campaign in Michigan is so important, because it’s going to reflect whether there are changes and shifts in the Democratic electorate that actually votes. So where we land with future races, whether in Michigan or in California or etc., I think is going to go a long way to determining whether this sort of elite opinion maker sentiment, whether it’s Ezra Klein, or Nate Silver, whether that actually goes anywhere and influences the broader electorate or whether it’s just speaking to a narrow class of folks.

This is sort of Ezra’s way of looking at this: OK, we’ll just throw it to an open convention. There’s no way to get people involved in the primaries right now, nobody basically on the Democratic side outside of Dean Phillips has any kind of organizational structure, and so you’re going to have to do this at an open convention. And may the best man win, basically, he says. Not that you would have a coronation, a passing of the torch from Biden to his vice president for example, but that everybody would get to have their own opportunity to speak, and then the convention delegates, being duly selected by the states, will then make a wise decision. I think that flies in the face of kind of the last 50 years of history in the Democratic Party and in parties more generally. They generally like to abide by the wishes of the voters of those particular states, not create an independent judgment. Everything we’ve been doing in the primary process, particularly around minimizing the impact of superdelegates, has been to remove that independent judgment from delegates to these conventions. It’s hard for me to conceive of a selection process that looks increasingly like a small group of elites doing a backroom deal and picking the nominee of the party to not generate backlash. It’s going to generate a backlash! We’ve had this movement toward more democracy in how nominees are chosen for 50 years. And the idea that you’re going to roll it back completely in one cycle because a president who even the people who think he should be replaced go out of their way to say I think he can do the job of president, I think he’s doing a good job even, just because he’s going to be old? It just defies description to me that this wouldn’t raise more splits and struggles and fights within the Democratic coalition, which is usually pretty uneasy and irascible to begin with. The idea that this would be just really an easy, simple process doesn’t sit well with me.

The problem that I have with looking at this presidential race as a referendum on Joe Biden[’s age] is that presidencies are amalgams of thousands of people. Some of them that Biden has chosen are very, very good. And I don’t know that if you wholesale replace Joe Biden at the Democratic National Convention with some other candidate, that that replacement would keep the people who have really effected a sea change in American politics and political economy. Will they keep Lina Khan? Will they keep Jonathan Kanter? Will they keep Rohit Chopra at the CFPB? Will they keep Katherine Tai at the U.S. trade representative? These folks are really engaged in a project of moving the Democratic Party away from a thrall to Wall Street and toward a more populist conception of how the economy works and what government’s role in affecting broadly shared prosperity is. I don’t think an open convention process will wrestle with these issues. It will be largely decided and determined on affect, on can they give a good speech, on are they persuasive to the broader public. It will be played out along these theatrical political lines. And the policy that really, like Biden or not, he has brought forward, along these very important areas of our economy and areas of policy, from competition policy to trade to industrial policy, those will be in the background. Those will not be part of any kind of open convention process that goes about picking any kind of replacement nominee. And so I feel like we’re putting the theatrics of how campaigns are run and won over the realities of governing.

There is, as Ezra says, a difference between being president and running for president. But I think this is a fundamental problem with the way politics is covered and the way politics is reported on. At the end of the day, what matters to people’s lives in terms of their personal circumstances is being president. But what certainly matters to the media and what matters to a lot of elite opinion makers is running for president. I think that’s just a fundamental disconnect. We have this sort of great man of history [theory] where presidencies are encapsulated in one man making decisions and sitting in meetings and saying go there and do this. When the realities of governing are that presidents delegate to hundreds if not thousands of people. And there is no sort of one way in which those who are delegated to move the country. I talked about the nominees and appointees who have done a really good job. We could talk about the State Department, we could talk about the attorney general himself as examples of where things have not gone in a good direction. And we could even talk about areas where the individual has grown in office. I would make a distinction between, say, the Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra, who has resisted areas in which HHS could engage in much stronger policy on drug prices, on how Medicare Advantage is treated, and so on. I would make a distinction between him and someone like Pete Buttigieg, who initially in office was the same kind of go-along-to-get-along force, he was more interested in being on TV than doing the job of the transportation secretary. But that has changed. DOT has done a really interesting job, particularly around enforcement around the airlines, bringing them to heel. This year was a much more smooth Christmas season in terms of the lack of flight delays. There have been real fines for misconduct by the airlines. Buttigieg has shifted within the position. He has moved where the directives of a whole-of-government approach to competition and consumer protection have moved. And by the way, Biden is a part of that. He put this directive out there. Even if it was largely shaped by the folks within his competition [office], people like Tim Wu.

So I just think there’s a fundamental difference here. And we’re talking about Biden [being] deficient in the qualities of running for president. And of course, if you’re deficient in those qualities and you lose the presidency, then how you govern doesn’t really matter, right? Because you don’t get to do that, you don’t get to govern. So I understand that at an abstract level. But I think we’re kind of missing the forest for the trees. In an open convention, free-for-all kind of process, none of these things that have been so fundamental to the shifts in the Democratic Party over the last decade will be part of the conversation. And I think that’s a serious problem.