In the end, the pressure on President Biden to step aside, orchestrated by increasingly blatant leaks from Democratic leaders and the public abandonment of party lawmakers, became too great, as was obviously inevitable.
Even a sitting president with some accomplishments can't run for reelection when donors tune him out, when nearly two-thirds of Democrats don't want him to seek a second term, and when a public declaration that Joe must go is a sure ticket to television appearances.
Shortly after Biden, who is recovering from COVID-19, shook up the 2024 race yesterday by endorsing Kamala Harris, which could well have given her the nomination, the tectonic plates shifted. Shortly after Biden declared that “it was in the best interest of my party and my country for me to step down,” Harris said she was “honored to have the endorsement of the president and I intend to win this nomination.”
Politics is a cold business. Journalists and commentators quickly moved on to speculating about who Harris' running mate will be.
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President Biden, left, and Vice President Kamala Harris on the Truman Balcony of the White House in Washington, DC, U.S., Thursday, July 4, 2024. (Tierney L. Cruz)
What I will never understand is why Biden gave so many signals that he would stay in the race, without a doubt. He said he was eager to get out on the campaign trail this week. He had campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon make a rare television appearance to say the boss was not going to drop out, and had a White House spokesman deny reports suggesting otherwise.
Harris has undeniable strengths and weaknesses, but at 59 she is now the youngest candidate in the race to take on Donald Trump.
And the latest stunning twist — a president stepping down after all the primary votes have been cast — came a week after Trump was nearly assassinated: the bullet grazed his ear as he turned his head just enough to save his life.
As Trump said at a weekend rally: “I took a bullet for democracy.”
On yesterday's “Media Buzz,” which ended before Biden's announcement, Kevin Corke, in Rehoboth Beach, said Democrats “would be out of the running for an awfully long time. The idea of a black woman being ignored, the way she would be perceived in the community, would be devastating.”
The person most responsible for Biden's decision is Nancy Pelosi, who warned the president privately, then had allies like Adam Schiff go public with it, and then used leaks to the press to make Biden's position untenable.
The former House speaker has not endorsed Harris, nor has Barack Obama, who hinted that he thought his former vice president would lose and said yesterday that there should be a process to decide the nomination.
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That may be because they believe Harris would gain more momentum by defeating someone in a mini-primary, rather than looking like a choice imposed by party bosses. That may certainly seem undemocratic, though most Biden delegates would likely follow the president’s lead.
The biggest mistake many journalists make is basing their assessment of Harris's chances on her standing in the current polls.
Trump was eager to run against Biden, especially after that disastrous debate. But it was also Trump, while cursing Kamala from a golf cart, who predicted he would run against her.
President Biden dropped out of the 2024 race on Sunday. (Anna Moneymaker)
The vice president had a rocky first two years, often at odds with the West Wing, but over the past year he has gained poise and confidence.
Here are its assets and liabilities:
Harris can take some credit for Biden’s legislative achievements (though that was always too retrograde), but that means she also has to shoulder Biden’s failures, like Afghanistan and the border fiasco (which she was nominally in charge of in a no-win situation). Biden waited too long to crack down on asylum seekers.
He has already been asked whether he participated in a cover-up, for attesting to the president's mental acuity while seeing the signs of his decline up close. That's a tough question.
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Biden never managed to capture the country's attention, in part because his inner circle kept him away from reporters (even during two Super Bowl interviews), for reasons we now understand.
Harris needs to prove she can get a message across and should give plenty of interviews.
Whether or not another Democrat challenges her, Harris, who began making calls yesterday, needs to quickly assemble a team to challenge a well-oiled Trump campaign that has been running smoothly all year.
According to Axios, “several senior Democrats are privately telling us that mounting pressure from party leaders in Congress and close friends will persuade President Biden to decide to drop out of the presidential race as early as this weekend.” However, deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks told reporters that Biden is “not hesitating at all. The president has made his decision.”
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally on June 28, 2024, in Las Vegas. (Bizuayehu Tesfaye)
And the New York Times was right when it reported that “several people close to President Biden said Thursday that they believe he has begun to come to terms with the idea that he may not be able to win in November and may have to drop out of the race, bowing to the growing demands of many anxious members of his party.”
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Now here's the final irony: Some Republicans and conservatives, including National Review, say that if Biden is unfit to run a campaign, he cannot run the country now and should resign.
Which, of course, would give Kamala Harris a four-month head start as president.
