Democratic leaders have given President Joe Biden enough time and behind-the-scenes space to withdraw from his reelection campaign. By now, they are proving cowardly through their failure to demand publicly that Biden step aside.
Count former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton foremost among these gutless wonders. Especially Obama.
First, let’s understand what is at stake. This isn’t just about winning an election. This is about four more years of keeping in the most powerful office in the free world a man who already is barely competent for the job and slipping steadily. This is a perilous world with multiple, dangerous malefactors. The lives and liberty of some 330 million people, not to mention literally billions worldwide, depend on a steady hand in the Oval Office.
It is stupendously irresponsible for one of the two major U.S. political parties to ask the public to put someone as befuddled as Biden in power until he is 86 years old. Perhaps some 86-year-olds could do the job, but Biden is already a particularly old 81. Remember that it was more than 36 years ago that he suffered a double brain aneurysm that nearly killed him. Even compared to other octogenarians, surely Biden’s brain is more likely to be damaged, and his mind less likely to be sharp. From what he shows in public, it appears to be so.
None of this is Biden’s fault. This isn’t a matter of character but of physical and cognitive realities. The key consideration, though, is not what this means for Biden. The key is what it means for the free world.
That’s why those with the ability to push Biden from the race are ethically obligated to do so. And nobody is better positioned to do so than Obama, especially if he is joined, as he should be, by Clinton and other top officials such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. (Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, showing craven instincts, did just the opposite on July 9, publicly pledging fealty to Biden.)
In the world or political reality, it barely matters that by law, Biden can hold on to the Democratic nomination if he wants to do so. Even a man as stubborn as Biden and as intermittently addled as Biden still must recognize when reelection is entirely untenable. Obama and company can make it so.
If Obama, Clinton, Jeffries, and influential others were to issue a joint statement demanding that Biden leave the race and say specifically that it would be dangerous for the nation for him to be reelected, his campaign would have no chance to recover. None. Even first lady Jill Biden would recognize as much. The option would then be between a landslide loss to sedition-inspiring Donald Trump, which would make Biden a laughingstock in the history books, or a withdrawal combined with months of burnishing his historical image — aided mightily by the liberal media — as a “successful” one-term president who “accomplished” all the triumphs that his camp now claims.
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While Biden probably no longer can defeat Trump, and while he certainly would do so if Obama and company act as they should, another Democrat such as Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer would have a better-than-even chance of winning. If Biden’s term is “validated” by his party holding the White House, “history” (as defined by liberal academia) will adjudge him a success rather than an embarrassingly laughable failure.
There is no good reason for Obama and company to keep quiet. They owe it to their country to put Biden in a box with only one exit.