President Biden came out swinging this week after failing to convince many Democrats that he should stay in the race. Photo / Doug Mills, The New York Times
President Biden is pushing back against those who say he is not up to the job.
He was the favourite of the Democratic Party elite. He had been around for decades, knew everyone who was anyone, was a regular habitue of Sunday talk shows and appeared to be the safest choice to take on President Donald Trump.
Four years later, President Joe Biden is now aggressively attacking the establishment that once formed the core of his support, deriding the “elites,” the pollsters, the pundits, the donors and balky members of his party while making himself out to be the victim of unfair persecution. “I don’t care what those big names think,” he declared this week.
As he faces perhaps the most perilous moment of his political career, Biden has switched from defence to offence, taking a page out of his predecessor’s playbook to try to quash an internal uprising over his age and capacity. Rather than just try to show that he is up to the job, Biden has opted to push back against those who say he is not. Reassurance did not work. But recriminations might.
“He has to show he’s a fighter; that’s critical,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who worked on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. “They see him as weak, not strong, which is connected to being too old,” Belcher said, referring to voters. He added, “In an odd way, this fight might help him.”
The problem for Biden is that the doubts about his continued candidacy are not, in fact, only held by elites, pundits and donors. In interviews and surveys, many Democratic voters have made clear they share the uncertainty about Biden’s ability to beat Trump in the fall, or serve another four years as president until the age of 86.
A poll by The New York Times and Siena College after Biden’s June 27 debate with Trump found Democratic voters split right down the middle, with 48% saying Biden should stay in the race and 47% saying they would prefer another candidate.
But the president’s approach has rubbed some of his allies the wrong way. Paul Begala, a longtime party strategist and former adviser to President Bill Clinton who calls himself “a Biden Democrat,” expressed frustration on Tuesday that the president and his team had gone after Democrats like David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama, who have been outspoken about their concerns about the president.
“In my list of villains, Donald Trump is a bigger villain than David Axelrod, OK?” Begala said on CNN. “I’m really tired of them attacking Democrats of good faith who are really worried that Biden will cost us the House, the Senate and the White House. I guess I’d give them that advice: If you want to unite your party, try attacking Trump a little bit instead of these mythical Democratic elites.”
Former Representative Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, who has been staying in touch with his former House colleagues, said the debate about Biden’s future should be conducted in “a thoughtful, respectful” way. Once the decision was made, he said, Democrats needed to be unified to stop “a liar, dictator-loving sociopath” from becoming president.
“I get what he’s doing,” Malinowski said of Biden. “Some of the discourse you see online is not very thoughtful or respectful. It obviously needs to be totally respectful of him but also of those in the party who disagree about the best way to protect his legacy.”
Biden came out swinging this week after failing to convince many Democrats that he should stay in the race given his confused performance at the debate. He seemed particularly frustrated that no one was taking his insistence that he is remaining a candidate as the final word on the matter.
His letter to congressional Democrats and a phone call into Morning Joe on MSNBC on Monday were meant to put an end to the internal debate over his future and to force the party to accept that he will still be their nominee. The effort seemed to slow the erosion for a while, heartening Biden’s advisers.
But it did not end the matter. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the former speaker and one of Biden’s most important Democratic allies, went on the same television show Wednesday morning and spoke as if she did not consider Biden’s statement to be definitive. “It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” she said. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision. Because time is running short.”
Actor George Clooney, weighed in with an opinion essay in The New York Times on Wednesday, just weeks after hosting a lavish, record-setting fundraiser for the president in Los Angeles.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” Clooney wrote. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
Biden’s feisty tone this week was part instinct and part strategy. A graduate of the University of Delaware and Syracuse University’s law school, Biden has long had a chip on his shoulder about Ivy Leaguers and others he perceives to be elite, even as he assiduously worked for decades to be part of their club in Washington.
Even in the past 3 1/2 years, sitting in the Oval Office, he has nursed resentments toward those he believed underestimated him. He is still upset at newspapers that endorsed rivals during the 2020 Democratic primaries and commentators who doubted his ability to pass major bills that, in many cases, he did eventually sign into law.
Encouraged by his staff, Biden has convinced himself that the prognosticators were wrong about elections in 2020, 2022 and 2023, and therefore they are wrong again when they predict disaster for a Biden-led ticket this fall.
That he chose to go on Morning Joe to criticise elites, of course, carried its own irony, one that he seemed to recognize in the middle of his denunciation. “I’m getting so frustrated by the elites — now I’m not talking about you guys — the elites in the party, ‘Oh, they know so much more,’” he said.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said Biden’s combativeness was second nature. “It really, truly is who he is, at his core, to fight — to fight not just for himself but what he believes in,” she told a briefing. “And he has seen this over and over again: People count him out. People say he’s not going to win. People say, you know, all of the negative things that they want to put at his feet, and he proves them wrong over and over again.”
His tone has been reflected, even previewed, by his campaign operation, which from the early days in the debate backlash began blitzing out emails and fundraising appeals assailing the Democratic “bed-wetting brigade” and the various left-leaning columnists and editorialists who have called for him to drop out.
“President Biden and his team are exhibiting the only posture that they can if he’s to stay in this race — which is vehement, absolute statements about where the campaign stands,” said Bill Burton, a Democratic strategist and former deputy press secretary to Obama. “Otherwise, the media will look at any half-step backward as a signal that the whole thing is done.”
But some of Biden’s allies say he risks alienating the very people he needs to win the race. “President Biden would surely agree that unity is not something you just declare,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has worked closely with the White House on economic messaging.
“Lots of everyday voters and down-ballot Democrats who need to win for the sake of democracy still want to see this president vigorously fight Trump and Project 2025,” he added. “Biden should relish the challenge — saying ‘watch me,’ not ‘shame on you’ or ‘this conversation is done.’”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Peter Baker
Photographs by: Doug Mills and Haiyun Jiang
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
The nomination was controversial owing to allegations by the House Ethics Committee.