Joe Biden has never been the greatest orator or had the strongest political backbone, but he has always displayed one important skill throughout his decades in office: representing the center of the Democratic party, wherever that center may be at any given time.
It explains why he followed his party’s ideological journey and went from liberal Democrat in the 1980s to conservative austerian in the 1990s to Iraq war proponent in the 2000s to mildly progressive economic populist in this era. It also explains his announcement on Sunday that he is withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race.
Biden knew rank-and-file Democrats wanted him to step down (for good reason), and he made the belated but responsible decision to respect that demand – and potentially save the country from Donald Trump.
Biden will be lauded as making a courageous choice. But while it is obviously the right one, the president is hardly a hero in this history-making moment. He and his political machine created this political crisis. They waged a war on Democratic dissent. They brushed off those raising questions about the president’s electoral viability, punished dissenters, killed off any possibility of a contested presidential primary, covered up Biden’s health condition, and then tried to cling to power when everyone in the country saw his decline with their own eyes at the first presidential debate.
In the process, they delayed the possibility of a unified front, allowing Trump and the Republican party to pretend their corporate agenda is populist, while Democrats increasingly looked like sad reality-denying, norm-defending losers aping trite cliches from Aaron Sorkin scripts. Biden and his apparatchiks also damaged the credibility of Democratic politicians who publicly insisted everything was fine, when the entire country could see that it wasn’t.
But the damage is not necessarily permanent. To cite an overused phrase, Democrats can still be unburdened by what has been – but only if they don’t repeat their past mistakes.
Election-wise, Biden’s decision is a godsend for those who don’t want to see another Trump term. Polls have shown many potential Democratic candidates in a stronger position against Trump than Biden had been. That includes Vice-President Kamala Harris, who Biden has endorsed.
Assuming a new Democratic ticket includes a popular figure from a winnable swing states who can bring some pugilism to the ticket (perhaps someone like this guy), the party seems in a strong position to win – and Maga almost certainly knows that.
“The Trump campaign, from day one, has been built not to run against a generic Democrat – it’s been built to run a very specific race against a very specific opponent in Joe Biden,” the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta recently said in a recent interview about his reporting on Republicans’ campaign.
“Everything that they were engineering inside of this campaign, going back months and months and months, it was all very specific to defeating Biden. And so once you’ve done that work … the only thing that could ruin your best-laid plans is if that guy who you’ve been preparing to run against suddenly isn’t on the ballot any more.”
But exactly how Democrats select the ballot replacement is potentially pivotal.
Though a coronation could produce a winning candidate, it is a risky gambit. Donors, power brokers, and politicians reprising history in a smoke-filled backroom in Chicago to install a nominee could not only undercut Democrats’ claim to be campaigning to “protect democracy” – they could also rob the nominee of needed legitimacy and enthusiasm.
Though an open convention isn’t a perfect form of democracy, it is at least a democratic process. Requiring Harris and any other potential candidates to actually compete for the support of delegates elected from every community in the country is a way to battle test the eventual nominee. It will force them to solicit support and make a case for their prospective candidacies.
As important: it will force potential nominees to contend with inconvenient questions about their records before they are irreversibly locked in as the general election nominee against Trump, who will inevitably raise those questions on his own.
Biden should have faced such battle testing in a competitive presidential primary, so that the party could have seen his weaknesses and found someone else before now. But the Democratic machine used its power to prevent such a competition, which ultimately created this moment of peril.
Party bosses now shutting down any kind of competitive process in an open convention could be a dangerous repeat of that same mistake just a few months before the November election.
As Biden has faced growing pressure to withdraw, some have worried that this was a stealth coup by the donor class that saw Biden’s cognitive decline as a political opportunity to dethrone an administration whose policies challenge the power of billionaires and corporations. Biden’s allies tried to fan the flames of these concerns, at one point casting the push for Biden to withdraw as an “elite” plot.
There’s definitely reason for concern. Biden is no hero of the left, and some of his policies (see: Israel-Gaza) have been downright abhorrent. But he has also pushed some of the best and most populist economic policies of any president in 50 years.
His American Rescue Plan laudably discarded Obama-era austerity and was the largest investment in the working class in generations. By historical standards, his Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Labor have been bolder regulators than any in a half century. And while he refused to fight for something better, his climate legislation included some groundbreaking investments that were desperately needed.
All of this – plus Biden’s push to raise taxes on the wealthy – are indeed anathema to America’s oligarchy, and there is no doubt they would prefer that the next Democratic president return to the neoliberal agenda of the Clinton-Obama eras.
But just because donors were among the many voices calling for Biden to withdraw, that doesn’t mean their policy preferences will automatically become the new Democratic platform – as Biden himself proved.
Let’s remember: Biden was never a conviction politician like a Bernie Sanders or a Paul Wellstone, ideologically committed to an economic vision. He was a conservative, corporate-friendly Democrat for much of his career because he was a thumb-in-the-wind politician and corporate forces had done the organizing, lobbying, and narrative-shaping to make such odious politics mainstream inside the Reagan- and Bush-era Democratic party.
Biden as a 2020 candidate and as president broke from that past because the Sanders and Elizabeth Warren presidential candidacies as well as labor unions, environmental organizations, antitrust advocates and progressive groups had successfully shifted the center of the Democratic party to make neoliberal politics more problematic for party leaders to embrace, even if their donors demanded it.
The current policy challenge, then, is keeping that new center moored where it now is – and building from it.
Part of that effort has to do with the short-term work of making sure the specific replacement nominee isn’t some retrograde neoliberal throwback who triangulates against the Democratic base and discards the very policy agenda that has kept the party competitive, even amid Biden’s demise. There are surely powerful corporate-aligned factions in the Democratic coalition that would like to see that surrender happen.
The longer-term work is about making sure any future Democratic administration feels compelled to continuously champion as many or more forward-thinking policies as Biden has been forced to embrace.
That’s the real opportunity of this moment – and the work begins now.
David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at large at Jacobin, and the founder of The Lever. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter
