If Democrats want to win the election, they should dump Joe Biden now.
Before the pandemic, he at least sort of made sense as a nominee — average and endearingly normal compared to our bombastic incumbent.
In the before-times, President Trump himself was the issue of the 2020 campaign. It was enough for Biden to promise a return to normalcy, meaning good manners. Obama’s vice president was no one’s first choice in the Democratic Party, but everyone’s last resort after all those fresh-faced diversity candidates failed to gain traction and a second wave of billionaires and eccentrics had failed in their footsteps. At that point, the cupboard was bare.
Biden, who longed to be president for the last 60 years, became the candidate of the last resort against socialist Bernie Sanders. On the eve of the primary in South Carolina, Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., sternly reminded the faithful of just what was at stake. His unstated message: “He’s better than nothing.” And amid peace and prosperity, that seemed good enough. The only menace seemed to be Trump’s tirades and tantrums, his dissing of allies, and possibly his pullout from Syria (quickly reversed when his party revolted).
As long as that world lasted, Biden seemed up to the challenge. But the pandemic draws new attention to Biden’s fitness to lead.
For the first time in his life, Trump had a cause and an issue that was bigger than he was, speaking not just to his base but to the whole country. Suddenly, he was just one of many trying to find a solution to a menace threatening them all. Meanwhile, Biden had no office to hold or platform to speak from. His voice, when he spoke, was drowned out completely by the voices of Trump and his aides, and of the mayors and governors attempting to deal with it all.
“Joe Biden’s new podcast is so bad,” wrote Alex Shephard of The New Republic on Friday. “‘Here’s The Deal’ is less a podcast than the audio equivalent of a hostage holding up a newspaper with the day’s date … [It] sounds cheap and thrown together … Biden’s odd speech patterns are sometimes heavily edited, giving them an odd feel … At other times, Biden speaks in paragraphs that are the verbal equivalent of someone falling down a rocky hill.”
Biden himself, who seemed he might be kind of ok as a caretaker president in a less troubled world, as someone who could hold things in place until the next stars could emerge from the ranks of both parties, now seems like a much bigger risk. His cluelessness might just be worse than Trump’s eccentricities and more of a danger to life.
If the Democrats mean what they say, that defeating Trump is their very first order of business and a moral necessity, they will replace Biden now and by any means possible, with some sane governor on the front lines of the struggle, whose campaign, just like Trump’s, would be his performance in office. They owe nothing less to themselves and their country. And who knows? They might just pull it off.
