It was the speech he never wanted to give. On Wednesday night, not quite a month after a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump that would ultimately prove the undoing of his Presidency, Joe Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office to explain his stunning decision, announced last Sunday, via a tersely written statement, to relinquish his shot at another four years in the office that he spent most of his adult life seeking. “I revere this office, but I love my country more,” Biden said. He cast his decision as one of principle and personal sacrifice, made in the name of defeating Trump. “Nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy,” he said, “and that includes personal ambition.” It was time, he added, to “pass the torch to a new generation.”
Of course, that wasn’t quite how it had happened. Biden’s own Party leaders, panicked over the prospect of him losing to Trump, had all but pushed him out in favor of his Vice-President, Kamala Harris. The short, awkward speech—a mere eleven minutes, though it felt longer than that, listening to Biden’s painful communion with the ghosts of Presidents past as he justified his decision to step aside a few months before the election—served as yet another reminder of why Democratic officials had felt such an urgency to act.
It was hard to know what to expect in advance of this swan song from a defiant eighty-one-year-old who had, until this weekend, demanded that his party ignore the polls and the very visible evidence of his decline to keep him on the ballot. Last week, at the Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee, days after Trump was nearly assassinated, I ran into a TV anchor. I’m so done with unprecedented, she said. How about some precedented for a change? But, really, there is little history to draw on for what is happening in 2024. Lyndon B. Johnson was the only other modern President to choose not to run again for a second term, and, in the address he gave to the nation making his surprise announcement, in March of 1968, the trauma of Vietnam that prompted his decision did not seem at all comparable to Biden’s quieter tragedy of an octogenarian in decline and denial.
Incredibly, Johnson was the exact same age when he made that speech as Harris is today—fifty-nine. While he is remembered as careworn and exhausted by the conflict and political violence that defined his time in office—and, indeed, would live only four more years after leaving the White House—Harris’s ascension has been portrayed as a jolt of vigor injected into the campaign against the seventy-eight-year-old Trump, who is now the oldest candidate ever nominated for President. Context in politics is everything.
Biden’s exit, belated as it was, has succeeded in that respect—offering a new context for both Harris and the election. In recent weeks, as Biden struggled to keep his campaign going, he had been less than effusive about Harris. Asked at a press conference earlier this month about whether the Vice-President could do well at the top of the ticket, Biden offered an equivocal answer at best. “Look,” he said, “I wouldn’t have picked Vice-President Trump to be Vice-President did I think she was not qualified to be President.” The gaffe, unsurprisingly, got more attention than any other part of his appearance. Biden was far more generous in his praise of his Vice-President on Wednesday night. Harris, he said, was “great,” “experienced,” “tough,” and “capable.”
Perhaps his heart wasn’t really in it this time, either. But I’m not sure, in the end, how much it mattered. The decision to exit was what counted.
Washington is a brutally unsentimental place. The President’s transition from all-powerful to lame duck occurred in the seconds that it took to post his exit announcement on Sunday. His address on Wednesday, which was held only after he had recovered from a bout of COVID and returned to Washington from the isolation of his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, was difficult to listen to. It was also a necessary first step toward reclaiming a legacy tarnished by the hubris and folly of his decision last year to launch what turned out to be an abortive reëlection campaign. (“It’s not about me,” he said at one point in his address, “it’s about you.”) Soon enough, historians rather than TV pundits will be arguing over the merits of Biden’s infrastructure bill and foreign policy, about whether he could have done more to tame inflation and if this is indeed the “inflection point” in world history that he has often proclaimed it to be. But it already seemed a bit beside the point. The politics have changed. In: Who will Harris pick for Veep? Out: Hunter Biden sightings in the West Wing.
Years from now, I suspect it’s not Biden’s speech that I will remember so much as the few heady days of pure political joy among Democrats that preceded it: the race against Trump, practically given up for lost, suddenly looked winnable again. For me, this was summed up in a visual on Tuesday afternoon—Biden, walking alone and achingly, from Air Force One on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, in Maryland, as he made his way back to Washington after a momentous weekend. At almost the same time, there was Harris, wearing a smile a mile wide, onstage in a packed Wisconsin auditorium for a Milwaukee rally, her first since she became the presumptive nominee. The polls were looking up; more than a hundred million dollars had poured into her campaign. “We will win!” she shouted. It seemed almost believable.
Is the delight over Harris a temporary phenomenon, a species of irrational exuberance? Maybe, but for Democrats it was a hell of a lot better than the I’d-vote-for-Biden-even-if-he’s-dead discourse that has thus far permeated their 2024 election season.
It is also true, of course, that the optimism of the past few days is bound to fade. The reality of an evenly split nation and a daunting electoral map demands it. And we all know this—the race is on to define Harris. The attacks will be ugly and relentless. During a North Carolina rally on Wednesday evening before Biden’s address, Trump vowed, “I’m not going to be nice.” You can be sure of that.
All week, I’ve been thinking of an observation from the Never Trump Republican strategist Sarah Longwell. “Public opinion is like cement—it’s soft at first and you can move it,” she told me during the 2020 campaign. Soon enough, however, “it hardens.” Time is short. Biden’s political collapse this year was, it seems to me, rooted in his failure to prosecute the case against his predecessor. The race became all about the current President’s age and fitness for office rather than the ex-President’s offenses against democracy and the rule of law—or his own obvious age-related impairment, for that matter. Now Democrats have in Harris an actual former prosecutor on the job, but a reminder is in order: Every minute the Republicans succeed in getting the electorate to argue over Harris is another distraction from the main issue of 2024—Trump himself.
Was Biden’s decision to step aside a final, noble act of self-sacrifice in a fifty-year career of public service, as he portrayed it in Wednesday night’s valedictory speech? Ask me in November. ♦
