Biden's meltdown was the inevitable conclusion to a bigger problem

Decades of failed leadership delivered this moment

Welcome to a Friday morning edition of Progress Report.

Last night’s debate was an utter disaster, and after two years of shouting down any criticism of the president and suggestions that maybe he shouldn’t run again, Democrats are now finally acknowledging what I’ve been saying for a long time now: Biden should not have run for a second term and really can’t be the nominee.

Today, I want to look at just how we got here, because the problem is much bigger than Biden and requires a solution far broader than just replacing him on the ticket.

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It should have never gotten this far.

President Joe Biden last night produced the worst debate performance in modern memory. He looked old and feeble, sounded confused and exhausted, and moved like he’d just gotten out of a hospital bed for the first time in a week.

To be fair to Biden, nobody covered themselves in glory during the debate. Donald Trump spoke almost exclusively in lazy lies and disgusting epithets, and the CNN moderators, who normalized his unprecedented criminality, did so little fact-checking that it seemed as if they’d placed themselves on mute. Those moral and professional deficiencies should matter, but they’re baked in to debates at this point, while Biden’s stumbles were so frequent and pronounced that everything else faded into the background.

It was the exact sort of performance that Democrats have been dreading for the past year. Biden’s flop was shocking, but hardly surprising, which is the bigger problem.

In 2020, a 78-year-old Joe Biden became the oldest person to ever be elected president, and he’s slowed considerably since then. By last fall, roughly three-quarters of voters — including two-thirds of Democrats — were telling pollsters that they thought Biden was too old to effectively serve a second term. It was little better in swing states, where 55 percent of his 2020 supporters told another pollster that he was too old to do the job for another four years.

With so much focus on his age, Biden’s most recent State of the Union address was less about presenting a vision for America’s future as it was trying to prove that he had a place in it. The speech was preceded by days of speculation about his physical stamina, then followed by palpable relief and even some jubilation once he got through it with little incident.

Democratic messengers and reporters both suggested that the performance could allay voter skepticism about Biden’s age, betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of the refractory way in which public perceptions take shape.

It simply isn’t natural or sustainable to white-knuckle every public appearance by your presidential candidate, hoping against hope that he or she sounds coherent and mentally astute enough to quiet doubters for another day. It’s even more foolish to play this daily roulette with time for a president who is overwhelmingly unpopular for a myriad of other reasons, especially when the stakes are as existential as they are right now.

Remember, nobody is happy with the economy, the catastrophe in Gaza, or immigration, either. Biden’s age and frailty only adds to the notion that he can’t fix these problems, and last night, it often seemed sometimes as if he couldn’t grasp them, either. This is not the person you nominate if you truly think democracy is on the line.

The inevitable conclusion to failed leadership

I spent much of 2023 and early 2024 calling for some prominent Democrat to challenge Biden, but it was futile, because none of the rising Democratic stars were willing to step out of line or defy the White House’s increasingly unnerving belief that the polls had it all wrong. Democrats just don’t challenge their leaders, and in fact punish those who try.

This is a party caught in the paralysis of hero worship and deference to power, with leaders who trust instincts that have not been sharpened in 30 years. There are many reasons for the populist anger that is engulfing the country, and they all come back to rejection of a status quo that has not worked for decades.

House leadership remains mostly a gerontocracy. A Senate seat from a blue state is as close to a lifetime appointment as it gets. And many base voters have been conditioned to believe that any criticism of Team Blue’s elected officials will hand elections right to Republicans.

It’s a strange dynamic, watching people cling to control of power that they simply do not believe in wielding, and it’s come to define the party’s leadership and approach to governance. The past decade has only seen it get worse.

In 2016, leaders cleared tried to clear presidential field to ensure that Hillary Clinton could have an easy coronation, which primary voters clearly did not appreciate, as evidenced by Bernie Sanders’s meteoric rise.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a giant of history, could have retired at 80-years-old and ensured a liberal justice succeeded her. Instead, despite having survived colon cancer in 1999 and surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2009, she ignored the public’s calls for her retirement and was given full deference by the White House. When she died at the age of 87, President Trump was able to choose her successor, giving conservatives generational control of the Supreme Court and tarnishing her legacy.

As the Supreme Court’s deep culture of corruption becomes public, Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin outright refuses to investigate or take action, giving carte blanche to extremist judges’ most fascistic tendencies. For two years, he even hid behind Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s failing health to avoid confirming more judges.

That Democrats backed her for re-election at 87 should be considered elder abuse, by the way. Here’s what I wrote about Feinstein’s final years in office and what it said about the party last year:

Democrats have trained supporters to believe nothing can be done about the terrors that Republicans inflict on people, as if legislative technicalities and traditions render their control of the White House, Senate, federal agencies, most government spending, and the public agenda moot. They’re trying to do the same thing with Dianne Feinstein, using her grievously ill condition as an excuse to avoid responsibility and deceiving the public in order to manipulate primary elections.

Attorney General Merrick Garland slow-walked prosecuting Donald Trump for his role in trying to overthrow the government, and now he won’t face any trial until at least after the election, if ever. Biden chose Garland, of course, after he became a liberal hero for being denied a seat on the Supreme Court.

Garland’s defenders insisted that he was just following protocol, but that was debunked. Durbin’s claims the rules don’t allow him to enforce subpoenas or hold people accountable, but that is plainly untrue. Both of these lies reflect the party’s approach to governance. It is a learned helplessness that eschews politics and populism for preemptive surrender, always in service of ideological conservatism and maintenance of the status quo.

Think back to the policy debates of Biden’s first two years in office. Democrats could have passed universal child care and community college, paid leave, and an abundance of other ultra-popular policies that the president ran on in 2020. They could have passed federal voting rights protections and codified Roe v. Wade.

Instead, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin suddenly became champions of the filibuster, and the White House used none of its unique power — no allied TV advertisements, no presidential speeches in their states, no LBJ-style arm-twisting with federal funds, no primary threats — to persuade them otherwise.

The same went for the conservative members who gutted drug price protections and killed the child tax credit while preventing tax increases on private equity. The argument was that they had to take what they could get, but if the White House can’t persuade Kathleen Rice or Josh Gottheimer to get in line, it doesn’t deserve its power.

So now what?

We shouldn’t be in this position. A functional party that reads public opinion and responds accordingly would have had a real primary process, and anybody who insists that voters chose Biden as the nominee is just trying to drag their heels and protect party leaders.

That being said, the steps to replace Biden are tricky. States are firming up their ballots, and Republicans will no doubt throw as many legal challenges as possible at any effort to change the ticket. More concerning, because all the primaries are over, Democrats would have to choose their candidate at a contested convention. That means that unless the nod went to Vice President Kamala Harris, who was on the ticket with Biden during the primaries, the public will have technically had the nominee imposed on them.

The list of complications runs on and on, and for the next few days or weeks, there will be articles and cable news segments exploring them in depth. Many of them will quote anonymous Democrats in the White House and beyond, who will encourage the perception that there’s no way out but through. This is what the party’s sclerotic leadership has done time and again. But none of the complications present bigger problems than we’d have if we just simply gave up, kept Biden on as the nominee, and watched Donald Trump ascend back to power.

There are several viable contenders who I’d have been happy to see take over for Biden last year and think should declare their willingness to do so right now. Biden allies should be coming out from behind the safety of the anonymous text to political reporters and publicly calling for him to step aside.

Democrats have proven that they need to be bullied and forced into making any change at all, and after 18 months of delusional insistence that polls were wrong and that Americans would line up behind a ghost of a man, there’s no more time to waste.

A larger cultural shift is required, as well. Democratic voters have been too loyal to their leaders, too afraid to call for a change, and too blinkered to see reality. They need to stop believing that criticizing leaders is going to help Republicans.

I wrote this last May:

The Democratic Party is run almost entirely by octogenarians who refuse to relinquish their grip on power, no matter how much damage they’re causing. Products of a DC that has not existed for decades, leaders like Pelosi, Durbin, Janet Yellen, Merrick Garland, and the version of Joe Biden that’s been reemerging this year are simply not equipped for our new era of political warfare. Deals may get hammered out from time to time in Washington, but sociopolitical detente is no longer possible.

A full year later, deferring to these people has put us on the brink of a meltdown. It’s up to voters now to demand a change of presidential nominee, to vote out their outdated leaders, and to insist on new ideas before it’s too late.

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