THANKS FOR EVERYTHING, JOE
...you are an American Hero
I was driving home from the grocery store this afternoon when — paradoxically — I was saddened by news that I had hoped to hear.
Joe Biden had just released a letter saying that he had chosen not to run for reelection “in the best interest of my party and the country.”
I was saddened because Joe Biden has been such a good and decent man who has had an impressive run as President despite a Republican party that did everything they could to sabotage his presidency (and by extension our well-being as a nation), starting with the day that 147 of their members of Congress voted against certifying his election victory despite a margin of more than 7 MILLION votes. You can see the list here. (Many are still in office. If you are a constituent do what you can to boot them out.)
He deserved much better. Yet his retirement from the field was what I’d hoped to hear, because he clearly lacked the energy for this last battle.
Despite major accomplishments Joe Biden has been so disrespected and unfairly maligned by MAGA acolytes who, frankly, could not carry his jockstrap. As the WAPO’s (74 year old) David Ignatius wrote today:
Biden’s decision will allow a relieved country to applaud his success as president. Much of the Republican critique of Biden is pure nonsense. In fact, he helped steward sustained economic growth. He made critical investments in technology and infrastructure. He rebuilt America’s foreign alliances. And he was steadfast in the great moral challenge of our time, which was resistance to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dark designs on Ukraine and the world.
When Joe Biden stepped forward in April of 2019 to run against Donald Trump he was probably already past his “Best By” date,1 assumedly comfortably retired at the Delaware seashore. But he was there when destiny called on him.
Trump’s remarks that seemed to defend the actions of violent racists and Nazi sympathizers in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017 made him consider a return to the arena. In announcing his candidacy on April 25, 2019 he said of Trump:
He said there were some very fine people on both sides…the President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime…The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America, America, is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States.
Throughout the campaign Biden framed the 2020 race as a “battle for the soul of this nation.”
Having an “unhealthy obsession” with political news,2 I was well versed in Biden’s decades-long career, and thought well of him. He’d sought the Presidency several times before, always falling out of the race early, but now it seemed to me that all of that may have happened for a reason. Perhaps God, or Fate or whatever spiritual force that was out there had held Biden back for just the time when he was needed most.
TO SAVE AMERICA FROM TRUMP.
He was perhaps no Democrat’s first choice as a candidate. But he was the consensus choice as the one who had the best chance to win. Dems coalesced around him. And he succeeded.
And now, when the polls showed that because of his diminished energy (NOT diminished wisdom or grit), he was unlikely to be able to do it again, he stepped aside to give us a better chance to again stop Trumpism, and hopefully bury it. As The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last expressed it today:
Biden became the man America needed at a dark moment in our history.
Then, when America needed someone else, Biden became the man who was willing to step away.
I’m not sure which of these transformations was more extraordinary.
My expectation is that President Biden will continue working for the American people, “from the bottom up and the middle out.”
And I expect he will also be a vigorous and valuable advocate for Kamala Harris or whoever succeeds him as the Democratic nominee.
According to news reports he rued acquiescing to Barack Obama’s promotion of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and his decision not to contest her nomination. The premature death of his son Beau of brain cancer in 2015 also had influenced that decision.
According to my wife Kristin.