President Biden delivered 8 minutes of prepared remarks and then fielded questions from a hostile press corps for roughly the remainder of an hour at the conclusion of the NATO Summit yesterday evening. It took place while we were preparing and eating dinner, so I didn’t watch it live. The few minutes of it I saw this morning reinforced my existing beliefs that he’s far and away a better choice to lead American foreign policy than his opponent and that he’s lost several steps as a communicator.
A pair of verbal flubs are being highlighted in the press coverage:
Toward the beginning of the question-and-answer, Biden mistakenly referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as former President Donald Trump. It was exactly the type of slip-up the White House and Biden’s campaign presumably would have feared amid mounting questions surrounding his mental acuity.
“I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president did I think she was not qualified to be president,” he said.
The president did not correct himself. He made a similar mistake earlier in the day, accidentally calling Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky “President Putin” while introducing him during a NATO event.
Those slips were, to say the least, unfortunate but, frankly, the sort of thing all of us do from time to time. Unfortunately, coming in the midst of a push to replace him as the Democratic nominee, they amplify the fear that he’s too old to do the job and, especially, to defeat Donald Trump in November.
Indeed, three more House Democrats joined the list of those calling on Biden to step aside:
The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Jim Himes, called on Biden to step aside almost at the exact time the news conference ended. He was the first House Democrat to call on the president to leave the ticket after the news conference, but not the last.
“It is because of those traits and, and in consideration of that legacy, that I hope President Biden will step away from the presidential campaign,” he said on X.
Not long after Himes, California Democrat Rep. Scott Peters issued his own call for Biden to withdraw his candidacy. Peters is a prominent Democrat among the center-left.
“Today I ask President Biden to withdraw from the presidential campaign,” the San Diego Democrat wrote in a statement shared with CNN.
Illinois Rep. Eric Sorensen soon after became the 17th Democrat on Capitol Hill to call for the president to step aside.
“In 2020, Joe Biden ran for President with the purpose of putting country over party. Today, I am asking him to do that again,” Sorensen said in a statement on X. “I am hopeful President Biden will step aside in his campaign for President.
And CBS News‘s Margaret Brennan reports “Potentially dozens of Democrats expected to call on Biden to step aside after NATO conference.”
Four Democratic sources with knowledge tell CBS News that they expect dozens of Democratic lawmakers over the next 48 hours to issue statements calling for President Biden to step out of the race.
The planning is coordinated, and some of the statements are pre-written, according to two sources. And it’s not clear that anything Mr. Biden said in his high-stakes press conference Thursday night could redirect the expected course of events.
House Democratic leadership has indicated to members that they should speak their minds, multiple sources told CBS News. One of those well-placed sources predicted that the next three to four days will be “brutal,” and that it may become untenable by sometime next week for the president to continue in the race.
CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere and Jeff Zeleny (“Obama, Pelosi privately expressed concerns over Biden“) answer a question I had yesterday morning:
Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi have spoken privately about Joe Biden and the future of his 2024 campaign. Both the former president and ex-speaker expressed concerns about how much harder they think it’s become for the president to beat Donald Trump. Neither is quite sure what to do.
Democrats are desperate for the dispiriting infighting to end so they can get back to trying to beat the former president. And they’re begging either Obama or Pelosi to help them get there, aware that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer doesn’t have the trust of Biden and that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries doesn’t have the depth of relationship to deliver the message.
[…]
Obama’s decision not to make any public comment for two weeks has left a number of leading Democrats feeling like he has left them flailing by holding to the same posture that has largely defined his post-presidency. After the debate, he posted on X, “Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know,” reiterating that sentiment at a fundraiser in New York for House Democrats the night after Biden’s performance. The former president hadn’t even planned to make any public statement, but Biden and Obama aides coordinated to get that post out in a way that reflected Biden campaign talking points that Obama’s first reelection debate in 2012 went badly, too, and it didn’t end up ending his campaign.
But Obama’s deepening skepticism about his friend’s ability to win reelection is one of the worst kept secrets in Washington.
When the history of this extraordinary two-week period of American politics is written, the fingerprints of Obama and Pelosi will be far more apparent than currently known, people familiar with the matter tell CNN, as the Democratic elders have served as a guidepost for a party in panic.
[…]
Obama has been fielding more calls than he’s making, people who have spoken to him say. When he does talk to anxious Democratic donors and officials, he’s been listening more than talking, carefully avoiding taking positions that he assumes would quickly leak.
That was also Obama’s approach to the call he had with Biden after the debate, which the current president has suggested to others included the former president being supportive of him riding out the turmoil. According to others familiar with the call, though, Obama stuck to his posture of being a “sounding board and private counselor.” He prodded. He played devil’s advocate. But he did not take a position.
[…]
If the former president did try to steer Biden to get out, people who know Obama say, he is aware the prism through which it could be seen. Biden has written that he felt Obama was not encouraging of his jumping in late to the Democratic primaries in the months after his son Beau died in 2015. Though Obama believes that he was trying to help his then-vice president focus on his grief and not wade into what would have been an incredibly hard primary campaign against Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, that may not be how another conversation would go.
“Biden would say, ‘Well, Mr. President, you already used that chip in 2015 and it got us Donald Trump,’” speculated a longtime 2020 campaign aide. “I think it would harden him more.”
Axios honchos Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen have coined the phrase “Committee to Unelect the President” to for what they describe as a loosely-organized group of “very-connected Democrats, mostly veterans of the Obama and Clinton administrations, [who] are plotting hourly to get [Biden] to withdraw quickly.” They have no leader or organization but are “trading texts, emails and polling, fighting fellow Democrats on TV and X, and circulating stories and arguments by sympathetic journalists and columnists.”
The committee includes:
- Former Obama aides: The strained relationship between Obama and Biden extends to their former aides, including David Axelrod (Obama’s ruthlessly pragmatic chief strategist) and the influential “Pod Save America” guys. Biden has reportedly called Axelrod a “prick,” and threw shade at him — “Oh! You’re kidding” — during Monday’s call-in on “Morning Joe.” The pod guys — Obama alumni Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor and Dan Pfeiffer — have irritated Biden’s camp by arguing for a new candidate. Lovett writes that it’s “hard to deny that in the two weeks since the debate, it’s the arrogant and small Joe Biden we’ve seen most.”
- Former Clinton advisers: Carville, appearing all over the cable dial, says unsparingly that a new candidate is inevitable, whether the president admits it or not. Keeping him would be “an idiotic choice for the future of this country,” Carville told Anderson Cooper on CNN.
- Elected Dems: Massive pressure is building from rank-and-file members of the Democratic caucus. One Democratic senator (Peter Welch of Vermont) and 17 House Democrats have publicly called for Biden to drop out. Scores more are furious at the White House for pushing them to support a president they view as unelectable.
- Swing-seat Dems: This is the group that really matters. Vulnerable Democrats have a clear-eyed view of the president’s prospects. These Dems will abandon him — some already have — if they sense their seats are in jeopardy.
- The donor class: George Clooney, who headlined the largest fundraiser in Democratic Party history last month, is the leading voice of a growing number of Hollywood types who want Biden to end his candidacy. The group includes Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel (Rahm’s brother).
- Late-night liberals: Stephen Colbert — who moderated a major Biden fundraiser at Radio City in March — strongly suggested the president should step aside: “I think that Biden debated as well as Abraham Lincoln, if you dug him up right now.” Jon Stewart has escalated pleas for the nominee to be someone else. He hosted Favreau and Vietor on his podcast yesterday.
- N.Y. Times Opinion: Debate-night columns by Tom Friedman and Nick Kristoff gave way to full-throated editorials — all saying Biden must go.
- Biden aides busily leaking: “Some longtime aides and advisers to President Biden,” the N.Y. Times reports, “have become increasingly convinced that he will have to step aside from the campaign, and in recent days they have been trying to come up with ways to persuade him that he should.”
This is just the damnedest thing I’ve seen in the 45 years I’ve been paying attention to American politics. To be sure, we’ve had unpopular Presidents face pressure from their party. Lyndon Johnson dropped out of the 1968 race after early primaries showed his ultimate fate—but I was two years old and living in Germany at the time. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter faced significant primary challenges and George H.W. Bush a modest one. But those were all fights over electability and the direction of the party, not the basic competence of the incumbent President.
Every instinct I have points to Biden’s removal being inevitable. But, of course, barring actual intervention from the Lord Almighty, the only person who can force Biden out is Biden. If he wants to go on, he goes on.
