Legend has it that when King George III heard that George Washington, the first US president, had decided to retire after his second term, he remarked: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
Joe Biden, 81, holed up at a Delaware beach house with a bad cough after a Covid-19 diagnosis, ended his presidential re-election campaign on Sunday. It was a selfless decision that put the country’s interests before his own – an act of grace that many see as vividly contrasting with the narcissism of his opponent Donald Trump.
It also sets the stage for a completely different sort of election in November as top Democrats rapidly rushed to endorse Kamala Harris, which the president himself did. Now the Republicans will have to deal with issues of mental competence and an ageing candidate.
Although many fellow Democrats had lost faith in Biden’s mental acuity and capacity to beat Trump, they had no mechanism to oust Biden, who won a mandate in the party primary and continued to enjoy the support of Black and progressive voters. Although he had spent decades striving for the crown, and sincerely believed he could finish the job, Biden ultimately realised that it was not about him and never had been.
Opinion polls strongly suggest that he would have lost in November to Trump, a twice-impeached felon and instigator of the January 6 insurrection. To cling on and go down in flames, returning the White House keys to Trump, would have destroyed Biden’s legacy. He would have been remembered as the man who saved democracy in 2020 only to sacrifice it at the altar of his own ambition in 2024.
Instead, whatever happens now, the 46th president will be remembered for steering America’s recovery from the Trump presidency and the coronavirus pandemic, delivering legislative achievements that will long outlast him – and giving his party a fighting chance to beat Trump again.
His withdrawal was “one of the most stunning acts of patriotism of my lifetime”, Norm Eisen, a former diplomat, wrote on Twitter/X. David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, added: “History will honor him for his many extraordinary accomplishments as president AND for the terribly difficult and selfless decision he made today.” Comedian Jon Stewart tweeted simply: “Legend.”
Biden’s announcement, via social media, was the latest drama in a month that has shaken US politics: his hapless debate performance on 27 June, a supreme court decision to grant broad presidential immunity on 1 July, an attempted assassination of Trump on 13 July, the collapse of the classified documents case against Trump, and the selection of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate on 15 July.
Future historians will surely look back at the first of those, the debate, as one of the most spectacular own goals in campaign history. For months Biden’s decline had been mostly concealed from the public as he stuck to teleprompter speeches and conducted fewer interviews or press conferences than his predecessors.
If this was a conspiracy, it was an inept one: it was Biden’s own campaign that sought a presidential debate much earlier than usual to awaken the nation to the danger of Trump. Instead the incumbent’s halting, doddering showing had the opposite effect, shining a harsh light on his own flaws. From that moment, the writing was on the wall.
By Sunday 36 congressional Democrats had publicly called on Biden to drop out of the race. Party heavyweights such as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and even his old boss, Obama, had sent powerful signals. Yet Senator Bernie Sanders, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others continued to rally around him. The final excruciating decision was Biden’s alone.
It immediately scrambled the race for the White House and potentially threw Trump on the back foot. Suddenly he, at 78, finds himself the oldest major party nominee for president that the US has ever seen; now it is his gaffes and name mix-ups that will be in the spotlight.
The lesson of elections in Britain and around the world this year is that anti-incumbent sentiment is high. If the US is also on course for a change election, Trump is no longer the change candidate. A man who has spent his entire media and political career as a limelight-hogging disrupter will now have to respond to disruption on the other side.
Biden immediately threw his weight behind Harris for the nomination. It is surely her race to lose. Some will back her with enthusiasm, pointing to the historic nature of her candidacy and how, since the fall of Roe v Wade, she has found her voice on the issue of abortion rights.
Tim Miller, who was communications director for the Jeb Bush 2016 presidential campaign, told the MSNBC network: “If you want to sum up a contrast, a prosecutor versus a convicted criminal, a woman who wants to protect your freedoms versus an old man that wants to take them away.”
Others will make a pragmatic case that to bypass the first woman, and first Black woman, to serve as vice-president would be disrespectful, offensive and self-defeating.
Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster and strategist, said on MSBNC: “If the Democrats want to give the White House back to Donald Trump, let them go into an open nomination process and disrespect and step over the first Black woman vice-president of this country and they will be committing absolute suicide. That is a surefire way for Donald Trump to become president again.”
The events of the past month, and the past eight years, have taught us to expect the unexpected – an open nominating process and Democratic melee is still possible. But Bill and Hillary Clinton were quick to endorse Harris and there will be more to come. Having witnessed last week’s Republican national convention in Milwaukee, Democrats understand the value of unity.
They are also aware that Trump’s entire political career has been built on divisiveness over race and sex, starting with the lie that Obama might have been born outside the US and gendered attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016. As Biden, Prospero-like, drowns his book, the election of Harris, a Black woman, would provide this era’s last word in poetic justice.
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