The case for stepping down

I was asleep during last night’s debate — I will scroll through 300 channels at 3 AM to watch playoff hockey but not a goddamn presidential debate — and am currently in a planes, trains and automobiles situation after a canceled flight, but will accept the consensus that it was a debacle for Biden. Like Erik, I’m not really sure what there is to be done at this point. Eric Levitz — not an anti-anti Trumper or someone looking for an excuse to want Democrats to lose — lays out the alternative case:

A comatose Joe Biden would make a better president than Donald Trump. And the president’s capacity to lead the executive branch is, by most accounts, far greater than his capacity to speak in coherent, extemporaneous sentences on CNN.

But the idea that Joe Biden is the best possible standard-bearer for the Democratic Party this November has lost all plausibility.

At the first presidential debate in Atlanta Thursday night, Trump spouted an endless stream of deranged lies, painting a portrait of a nonexistent United States in which babies are summarily executed in maternity wards, undocumented criminals live in the penthouses of luxury hotels on Uncle Sam’s dime, and the world’s wealthiest nation has become “a Third World country.”

But Biden’s senescence spoke louder than Trump’s mendacity.

The president spoke in broken sentences through a soft, sometimes tremulous voice (Biden’s campaign said that he had a cold). At various points, his mind failed to keep pace with his lips, causing him to abandon a half-delivered talking point or else lose his train of thought entirely. In one excruciating early moment — while trying to advertise his administration’s efforts to cap the prices of prescription drugs for Medicare beneficiaries — Biden said that he had been “making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with … the Covid … excuse me, with, um, dealing with everything we have to do with … uh … look … if … we finally beat Medicare.”

The president’s visual appearance was similarly unsettling, his skin pallid and his mouth hanging oddly agape during some of Trump’s answers.

This despairing spectacle — of a viciously dishonest insurrectionist turning in a debate performance that, if juxtaposed with anything but the president’s even more disjointed efforts would have seemed astoundingly rambling and incoherent — led many Democrats on social media and in private channels to call for Biden’s replacement.

Those calls are now irrefutable.

[…]

There is no way for the Democratic Party to deny Biden the nomination at this point. But Democratic leaders could personally lobby the president to step aside and endorse his preferred successor, preempting the hazards of a contested Democratic convention in late August. Waiting months to anoint a presumptive nominee would be highly risky. Rallying around Biden’s handpicked heir now would be much less so.

If one wishes to minimize intra-party strife, then Biden could simply endorse his vice president, who already functions as his default replacement. Few consider Harris to be among her party’s best political talents, but she offers far more upside than the version of Biden we saw Thursday night.

If Democratic leaders believe that it would be possible for Biden to endorse a more electorally formidable candidate (perhaps Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer?) without alienating key constituencies, then that might be the optimal course of action. Sticking with Biden, plainly, is not.

There’s still a bit too much yadda-yadding in the last graf to me — I’m not entirely sure that Biden’s endorsement can stop an open convention that would be a disaster, and the dreaming about an appealing but completely untested governor is probably a preview of the intraparty conflicts that will arise if Biden steps down. There are truly no good options at this point.

If Biden is going to step down it seems to me 1)it needs to be done as quickly as possible and 2)it needs to be Harris, . Whether this will work I can’t tell you but we have probably reached the point where there’s more upside than downside in Biden stepping down, if — and not trivial if — he can be persuaded to do so.