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August 12, 2024 - 3:30pm
Over the weekend, footage circulated that showed President Joe Biden stretched out in a chair on a Delaware beach. Since dropping his reelection bid, Biden has further withdrawn from the public eye. Democrats were clamouring for him to be more vigorous when he was still in the race for the White House, but many of them might be hoping that he stays on the beach now that he has become a lame duck.
Or is it maimed duck? Normally, a lame-duck president’s political party tries to gently usher him off the stage, but Biden’s exit has been much more abrupt. In one of the most ruthless displays of raw power-politics in recent American history, his fellow Democrats essentially ejected Biden from his own reelection bid. He groused on CBS’s Sunday Morning programme that it was indeed congressional Democrats who pushed him aside, and the fact that he has been defenestrated by his own party will shape the rest of his presidency.
Last week, CNN reported on what the Biden team projected would be the “four pillars” of the final months of his presidency: “[T]he continued implementation of key legislation; lowering costs and growing the economy through additional moves on student debt relief and efforts to bring down prescription drug prices; defending personal freedoms and civil rights by calling out hate and extremism; and ensuring US strength, security and leadership in the world.”
Both the overall contours and the particular details of this approach are revealing. Notice that the White House here is not talking about big, legislative wins. Instead, it’s focused on executive rule-making, messaging strategies, and foreign-policy endeavours.
The specific executive actions laid out by the administration correspond to two prongs of Harris’s campaign. Biden’s continued efforts to erase student-loan debt target the college-educated base of the Democratic Party (especially younger voters), and the populist proposal to bring down prescription drug prices echoes Harris’s own attacks on high medical costs. “Calling out hate and extremism” seems a continuation of the “soul of the nation” strategy that has shaped so much of Biden’s message as president. He even leaned into that theme in his Sunday Morning interview, saying that Trump was a “genuine danger to American security” and accusing “Maga Republicans” of having “little regard…for the political institutions” of American democracy. (Ironically, he lobbed this charge just after attacking the Supreme Court as “out of whack.”)
Chaos abroad has undermined Biden’s claim of a “return to normalcy,” and the Israel-Hamas war has divided the Democratic coalition. If Biden can achieve a breakthrough in Israel or Ukraine, that could theoretically help Harris. However, the Middle East in particular has often disappointed presidential legacy gambits, as Bill Clinton knows only too well (July 2000’s frantic Camp David Summit ended in frustration).
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SubscribeAs I understand it from numerous Partisan Media outlets, the Democrats have found that an unnamed, generic candidate almost always outpolls a known candidate. So by keeping Harris from taking any questions off script until mail voting starts and letting the Legacy Media spin narratives, she can run as a Generic Candidate in a referendum on Trump. Its a similar strategy to 2020.
Biden is the least of the Dems’ worries. They have shoved him aside for a political lightweight who is even more unpopular than Joe. She also has the border millstone, though the left will ignore that and everything else because party uber alles.
I can’t help feeling that the Republicans are being a bit inconsistent. When Biden was the candidate, they went on and on about how he was senile, and couldn’t be trusted to do the job. Now that he has dropped out, they go on about how the Democrats have “ejected him from his own reelection bid”.
I certainly hope so. The Dems have muzzled Harris and Waltz but Joe still has a voice, maybe. And he could screw it up.