By Frank Bruni
In the hours and days to come, many political observers will say that President Biden was backed into a corner and had no choice but to end his re-election campaign. His limitations had been laid painfully bare. He’d lost the confidence of the Democratic Party. And he was staggering toward an increasingly ugly revolt within it or a potentially harrowing defeat by Donald Trump. Bowing out wasn’t an act of grace. It was a saving of face.
All correct. But that’s not the whole truth. Not the full story. It misses the bigness of what Biden just did — its historical rarity, its emotional agony, its fundamental humility.
Yes, his decision to abandon his aspirations for a second term and let another, younger Democrat seek the presidency came weeks later than it should have, after too much secrecy, too much arrogance, too much denial. He pushed wishful thinking to the limit, scoffing at polls, sniping at the news media and claiming omniscience in a manner that eerily echoed Trump’s populist bluster. (“I’m getting so frustrated by the elites.” “Look at the crowds.”) But that doesn’t erase the enormous impact and extraordinary example of relinquishing his candidacy.
His exit from the presidential race creates a kind and magnitude of uncertainty about who one of the major party’s nominees will be — and what sort of late-stage, rushed operation that person can put together — that has no real precedent in modern American politics. Maybe his endorsement of Kamala Harris and the vice-president’s traditional status as heir apparent will amount to her speedy anointment. Maybe not. She has doubters aplenty, and many prominent Democrats crave a real competition, not a segue from obligatory indulgence of Biden to forced allegiance to Harris.
This is terra incognita. While Republicans in 1964 and Democrats in 1968 began their summer conventions without clarity about the outcome, the candidates in the hunt for the nomination had been making their pitches and jockeying for position for much of the year. They weren’t in a mad dash after a mid-July swerve that has many Americans reeling.
Nor was their party puzzling over what to do in a climate of panic this intense. Democrats aren’t simply thinking and talking about the best way to beat Republicans; they’re thinking and talking about the sturdiest bulwark against a second Trump administration that they rightly consider a dire threat to American democracy itself. And they’re confronting a version of Trump, with his wounded ear and his swollen claims of divine mission, as confident of victory and in command of his followers as he has ever been.
But Biden’s exit also scripts a compelling message for his Democratic successor and everyone else in the party. They can — they must — talk about the differences between what Biden is doing now, no matter how reluctant he was to do it, and Trump’s titanically selfish and epically destructive behavior in 2020, when he sought to stay in power by undermining the entire electoral process. They must emphasize the contrast between a president and party that finally dealt with uncomfortable truths and a president and party that have never stopped spinning unconscionable lies. While Trump and many of his fellow Republicans remain at war with reality, Biden and Democrats surrendered to it. I wish they’d done it a whole lot sooner; I and many other Americans would think better of them if they had. But it matters that they finally got there. It matters a great deal.
I’m not saying that there’s no self-preservation in Biden’s self-effacement. He’s guaranteeing a legacy and remembrances more flattering than the ones that would have been written if he’d remained in the race — against so many Democrats’ urgings and in contradiction of so many signs that he was doomed — and had come up short, the deluded midwife to Trump’s disastrous return to power. He may still be blamed if Trump wins in November, given how little time he left for Plan B, given his breach of trust with voters who were misled about his physical condition, given the mess for Democrats to clean up. But the recriminations won’t be as scathing.
And that’s just. However grudging, Biden’s withdrawal is a remarkable reckoning and a historical anomaly. It runs counter to human nature, or at least to the nature of humans who have known the exhilaration of being on top. Rulers cling to their gilded stations. When they’re threatened, they cling tighter. History is lousy with guests who wouldn’t leave, not once they’d experienced the fluffiness of the pillows and the fawning of the help.
How many senators, Mitch McConnell among them, have minimized their physical declines and their inability to work as forcefully as they once did? How many Supreme Court justices? How many presidents, for that matter? At various points, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan — to name just three — faced very real questions about their fitness. They or the people around them made excuses, made do and muddled through.
Those are imperfect analogies. Biden isn’t saying — nor is the principal complaint against him — that he struggles to do the job of president in real time. He’s accepting that four more years, or at least voters’ willingness to grant him that, are a wager too risky, an ambition too grand. And those other presidents could more easily veil their vulnerabilities and mask their flaws; they didn’t inhabit a media environment as intrusive as today’s.
“My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as president for the remainder of my term,” he said in a social media post on Sunday afternoon. In a separate post, he wrote: “It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your president. And while it has been my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus entirely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term.”
None of Biden’s predecessors in the White House provide a point of reference that tidily illuminates or presages current circumstances. Only a minority of American presidents didn’t seek another term for which they were eligible.
The last was Lyndon B. Johnson more than a half-century ago. He demurred in 1968. As with Biden, the worry that he’d be defeated and the determination that he could better serve the country by bowing out were very much in the mix. But the timing and the context were strikingly different. He’d just nearly lost the New Hampshire primary to Eugene McCarthy. It was the end of March, not the middle of July. The Democratic convention wasn’t a mere month away. And Johnson hadn’t completed a nomination contest during which the party’s voters had vetted and validated him anew.
Over the past four tumultuous weeks, Biden repeatedly referred to that contest to insist that despite his shockingly unsteady performance in a June 27 debate against Trump and metastasizing doubts about his health, he should press on. “We had a Democratic nominating process where the voters spoke clearly,” he said when he called in to the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on July 8. “I won 14 million of those votes.”
In speeches, interviews and a raptly watched news conference, he defensively, even angrily, touted his many first-term successes, casting them as all the proof that anyone could possibly need of his vim and vigor. He cavalierly shrugged off the proposal that he have a new, thorough neurological exam; the presidency, he smugly proclaimed, was a daily test, which he was passing with flying colors.
At times he sounded peeved. At times he sounded hurt. Where, he seemed to wonder, was the richly earned appreciation? The proper respect? And he returned to what was becoming a favorite refrain: He’d been counted out during the 2020 Democratic primaries, yet he’d prevailed. He’d been told two years later that Democrats would take a pummeling in the midterm elections; they didn’t. Why should he believe the naysayers now? Why did anybody else?
Those questions ignored shifts in the political landscape and the passage of time, whose toll on him was obvious in his murmured sentences and mangled facts. Those questions were a shield against the harsh truths spoken to him by the few Democratic leaders who had the guts for candor and could breach his tiny inner circle. Those questions bolstered his defiance.
And they make his deference now all the more remarkable. All the more poignant, too. If it was easy for so many of us to see how transformed Biden (and the country) was, it was even easier for him to tell himself that nothing important had changed — and he had plenty of enablers, in his family and in his employ, to whisper whatever he wanted to hear.
I keep thinking back to a phrase he used again and again in his interview on July 5 with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. “I’m the guy,” he said. “I’m the guy.” It was the boast of someone who had been underestimated not only in recent years but throughout his long political career. Someone who’d waited so long to realize a destiny that admirers began speaking of and he began dreaming of more than five decades earlier. Someone who’d known enough heartbreaking loss to thrash against the suggestion that he part with something so dear to him and so affirming. Someone diminished not by errors within his control but by biological dynamics beyond it. Someone being asked to acknowledge frailty in a milieu and at an altitude where that infrequently happens. Someone prodded to humble himself in an unhumble era.
He will not be the guy leading the Democratic ticket in November, and that’s cause for renewed optimism in a party that has many talented comers and the opportunity, as it chooses among them, to grab voters’ attention, demonstrate that it isn’t hostage to any one leader and emphasize its forward-looking gaze. Biden is the guy allowing that to happen, by ceding the stage in a manner as exceptional as it is imperative.