Some decent Democrat must challenge Biden
Quin Hillyer
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Not just Democratic realists but good conservatives, too, should be wishing, hoping, pleading, even begging a responsible Democrat to challenge President Joe Biden’s renomination. It’s almost “now or never” time, and the republic’s health depends on it. Or, better yet, on Biden voluntarily withdrawing.
Biden’s Sept. 19 speech to the United Nations featured yet more examples of him getting lost midway through sentences and slurring words or mushing them together incoherently. It’s not that he is senile, but he is a shell of his former self. There’s no way he will be able for five more years to do the job he barely manages to do now. It’s a dangerous world out there. The world’s greatest nation needs to provide a proverbial Leader of the Free World who actually can lead.
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Biden can’t.
When the job is this important, there should be no place for partisan strategists on either side to hope the other side puts up a terrible candidate. Patriotic Americans should hope that both parties, even the one with the ideology that opposes their own, nominate candidates who are the most competent, reasonable, and honest possible. Of course, the idea should be for one’s own party or philosophy to win, but as political wins or losses aren’t guaranteed, the best thing for the nation and the world is for the winner, regardless of party, to be of the greatest character and ability possible.
With a nuclear-armed world out there, the U.S. cannot afford to have a radical, a crook, or a physically or mentally unfit person in the Oval Office. Some of us recognize Biden as failing all three tests.
In that light, even conservatives (such as I am) should want Democrats to force Biden’s withdrawal or for someone of reasonable competence and moderation to challenge and defeat him in party primaries.
Polls show that even most Democratic voters don’t want Biden as their nominee. He is eminently defeatable in the primaries. What the Democrats need is somebody nonradical, non-“woke.” Somebody who doesn’t want to wage war on parents, believes with the vast majority of Americans that at least very-late-term abortions should be banned, recognizes that the federal debts and annual deficits have reached dangerous levels, will safeguard the First Amendment in all its aspects, and isn’t on a jihad against fossil fuels even if the candidate wants to encourage and subsidize “green energy.” And, of course, someone not prone to grift or graft and someone with some executive competence.
Someone like that could still be far, far too liberal for those of my conservative policy preferences but could at least reestablish a broad sense of political centeredness that could at least slightly tamp down the political fires that are scorching American public life.
Almost all of today’s nationally viable Democrats are to the political left of semimoderates of the late 1900s, such as Sens. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, John Glenn of Ohio, or Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts. Still, as I wrote earlier this year, people such as former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO), or Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) could each make a Bill Clinton-like play to eschew their party’s Kamala Harris-like extremes while offering more vigor than the dreadfully doddering Biden. All three have serious executive-level experience.
It would not be at all difficult to design a campaign message and strategy for one of these people to send Biden packing in a head-to-head intra-Democratic battle. And if, against conservative desires, one of these men actually wins the presidency, most Americans would recognize that even if these men’s policy preferences are misguided, their hands are steady enough and competence solid enough that the American experiment in a constitutional republic wouldn’t be at existential risk.