US president Joe Biden has many reasons to be grateful he is not a member of Britain’s ruling Conservatives, but one in particular stands out. When a Tory prime minister is polling badly, looking jaded and in danger of becoming a liability or a joke, they don’t mess about.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s Boris Johnson, Liz Truss or even Margaret Thatcher of sainted memory. Party chiefs put their heads together, have a quiet word. And the erstwhile leader, once lauded by all, is out. Done. Dumped. Deposed. Deposited on Downing Street’s rubbish heap of history.
American presidential politics doesn’t work that way. It is more respectful, less ruthless. A White House incumbent is hard to shift. Three failed impeachments in recent decades (with a fourth, Biden’s, now in prospect) make the point. Yet a president can be ousted if judged unable or unfit to serve – or is shamed into resigning.
So how safe is Biden from a Tory-style stab in the back? Will pressure on him to stand down reach breaking point? He has vowed to seek a second term next year. But polls indicate two in three Democrats want someone, anyone else as their nominee. Biden’s national approval rating is a low 40%. Most voters believe he is too old to run again.
The president’s age – he will be 81 in 2024 – is hardly a new issue. But it was cruelly exposed at last weekend’s press conference in Hanoi. Biden stumbled repeatedly, forgot what he was saying, and was eventually led away by aides.
Now everyone is asking how this tottering figure will survive the campaign hurly-burly, let alone four more years in office.
Biden supporters protest this is all desperately unfair. He is fit and spry, they insist. He has an impressive legislative record, has vanquished the pandemic, beaten inflation, stood up to Russia and China. Maybe. But many Americans see things differently, as Donald Trump shockingly demonstrated in 2016.
The case being made for Biden is beginning to sound like the case for Hillary Clinton back then. When push came to shove, party strategists condescendingly suggested, enough voters would see sense, reject the crazy guy and support the candidate they didn’t really like. They were wrong in 2016. Will they be wrong again?
Conservative columnist Bret Stephens listed some basic reasons why Biden fails to connect on Main Street. Prices of staples such as bread, eggs and chicken are way up. Gasoline is up 63% since he took office. Food and energy aren’t included in the government’s “core inflation” rate.
Feeling physically unsafe is a big issue for city dwellers, Stephens noted. So is petty crime, homelessness and epidemic drug addiction. Some people worry more about the migrant “invasion” of America’s border states than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Culture war” tensions, a growing social divide, loss of trust in government … all play into a Trumpian narrative of American weakness and decline, supposedly embodied and symbolised by an ageing president.
The argument for a fresh, younger face at the top of the Democratic ticket is persuasive. Yet not since Lyndon Johnson in 1968 has a sitting president declined to seek re-election. Looney-tunes conspiracy theorists aside, there is at present no credible challenger. And who wants to play Brutus anyway? Biden is no tyrant. He is just tired.
Illness might yet oblige him to quit early. Or he could change his mind about running. But Biden’s second-in-line, vice-president Kamala Harris, is even less popular. Twisting the knife, Republicans suggest a vote for him is a vote for a future President Harris.
The Democrats’ Biden dilemma is one side of a coin that promises to produce America’s weirdest electoral toss-up ever. Heads: an elderly man showing unmistakeable signs of mental and physical deterioration. Tails: a liar, cheat and “adjudicated rapist”, only three years younger, who could be in jail on election day.
Just as Democrats appear stuck with Biden, so too are moderate Republicans and independents stuck with Trump as probable GOP nominee. Trump faces 91 criminal charges. If there is any justice, he’ll go down. But if he has his way, justice will be indefinitely delayed – followed by presidential self-pardons.
Hopes that Trump may be struck off the ballot under the 14th amendment to the US constitution are buoyed by scholarly arguments that his incitement of the 6 January insurrection disqualifies him from public office. But this tenet is untested in law. Like so much of what is happening, it is uncharted constitutional territory.
All of which points to a larger question overshadowing the 2024 election: is the US constitution still fit for purpose? It’s an odd kind of democracy where the winner of the most votes is denied victory, as Clinton and Al Gore discovered. It is alarming to see the supreme court, a hallowed constitutional safety net, discredited by corruption and hard-right ideologues.
An objective observer (or founding father), looking down from above, would surely conclude a revered yet antiquated system of government that pits a fading old-timer against an unhinged, vengeful crook for a position of unmatched executive power and leadership of the “free world” is not working well.
Given all that is at stake, Biden and Trump should both stand down. That would electrify the decaying body politic. It would throw the contest wide open to fresh leaders, as urged last week by Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate. It would be a life-giving shot in the arm for a country “stagnating under the death grip of the gerontocracy,” in commentator Michelle Goldberg’s words.
It is not going to happen, as things stand, but it really should. Like its two principal protagonists, democracy in America is down on its creaking, aching knees – and that is doubly dangerous for Americans and the world.
