Democrats in array

The last 26 days constitute a classic example of a political party doing what a political party is supposed to do, which is to put the interests of the party, and by extension the party’s vision of the interest of the country, ahead of the interests of any individual, even if that person happens to be the head of the party itself.

This is the central difference between a healthy political party and a cult of personality. It is, I think, almost impossible to imagine anything happening between now and November that would cause the Republican party to remove Donald Trump as its presidential candidate. His boast about shooting somebody on 5th Avenue, which seemed hyperbolic eight years ago, is now something that is almost certainly quite literally true.

By contrast, the Democratic party as an institutional entity came gradually to the collective conclusion after the June 27 debate that circumstances had changed in a fundamental enough way to warrant bringing maximum institutional pressure on Joe Biden to withdraw from the race.

Now Biden deserves full credit for ultimately responding to that pressure in the appropriate way, as I believed he would. And what has happened in the last 24 hours confirms, I think, that the collective institutional decision was correct.

The extent to which the question of Joe Biden’s age and health had become a substantive or a cosmetic problem (I think there’s considerable evidence that it had very much become both) is, as I argued yesterday, almost irrelevant as a pragmatic matter. The very hard and bitter truth — I was and remain a big fan of Joe Biden’s presidency overall — is that the public’s belief that Biden was simply too old for the job was pervasive and strongly held: even the majority of the people planning to vote for him believed this. Again, we can argue about the extent to which that belief was valid, or a media creation, or a symptom of pure ageism, but in the end the party came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter one way or the other.

The strongest argument in the wake of the debate catastrophe for Biden remaining in the race was that there was no clear path for replacing him. I believed that Biden’s endorsement of Kamala Harris would eliminate that problem altogether, and it clearly has. A party that two days ago was fractured, demoralized, and seeing donors flee for the hills, is now almost completely united behind Harris, tremendously energized, and suddenly flush with many millions of dollars in new donations.

We of course will never know how well Biden would have done in the election compared to how Harris will do. But energy, enthusiasm, fresh hope, and lots of money are all keys to electoral success, especially in comparison to their antonyms.

The party decided, and the party made the right decision — as did, most critically, Joe Biden himself.