Like some other liberal Democrats who resisted warnings in July that President Biden should end his re-election bid, I pushed back against the "It's time to go, Joe" messages that were coming from news stories and commentaries. If Biden could make it through re-election in November, I thought, he wouldn’t need to barnstorm the country again; he could continue working from the Oval Office to advance the experienced, wise decision-making that he’d delivered since 2021 (with a notable exception in the Middle East).
Even when he stepped down and endorsed Kamala Harris to succeed him, I wondered if his vice president was seasoned and wise enough to continue his best work. Brilliant campaigning isn’t the same as governing, and a disturbingly large swath of the electorate that’s racially obtuse and/or misogynous won’t vote for her, even though some of its members did vote for a Black man in 2008 in the wake of the Bush administration’s Iraq War fiasco, emergency-management failures in Hurricane Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008 — the latter in complicity with neoliberal Democrats who thought that breaking glass ceilings excuses their breaking up the Glass-Steagall law of 1933, whose repeal Bill Clinton signed in 1999, thereby enabling the plunge into wild financing that helped bring on the meltdown.
