Joe Biden's Arguments For Staying In

They are compelling, but will they work?

Photo by Manny Becerra on Unsplash

After ten days of… let’s say “suboptimal” responses to his atrocious debate performance, Joe Biden came out swinging on Monday morning. First, early in the AM he fired off a letter to Congressional Democrats making it clear that not only was he staying in the race, he should be staying in the race:

We had a Democratic nomination process and the voters have spoken clearly and decisively. I received over 14 million votes, 87% of the votes cast across the entire nominating process. I have nearly 3,000 delegates, making me the presumptive nominee of our party by a wide margin.

This was a process open to anyone who wanted to run. Only three people chose to challenge me. One fared so badly that he left the primaries to run as an independent. Another attacked me for being too old and was soundly defeated. The voters of the Democratic Party have voted. They have chosen me to be the nominee of the party.

Do we now just say this process didn't matter? That the voters don't have a say?

I decline to do that. I feel a deep obligation to the faith and the trust the voters of the Democratic Party have placed in me to run this year. It was their decision to make. Not the press, not the ‘pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well intentioned. The voters — and the voters alone ~ decide the nominee of the Democratic Party. How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party? I cannot do that. I will not do that….

The question of how to move forward has been well-aired for over a week now. And it's time for it to end. We have one job. And that is to beat Donald Trump. We have 42 days to the Democratic Convention and 119 days to the general election. Any weakening of resolve or lack of clarity about the task ahead only helps Trump and hurts us. Its time to come together, move forward as a unified party, and defeat Donald Trump.

A few minutes after the letter was sent out, Biden phoned in to MSNBC’s Morning Joe to articulate this message with even greater emphasis. It would be safe to say that Biden’s blood was up. Here’s the video:

If you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, Politico’s Isabella Ramirez and Myah Ward wrote up the highlights:

President Joe Biden slammed his critics as “elites” in a live interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday, daring any challengers to run against him as he doubled down on his vow to stay in the race.

“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.’ Any of these guys that don’t think I should run, run against me. Announce for president, challenge me at the convention,” Biden told hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.

During the audio-only interview, Biden shot down Brzezinski’s description of him as the presumptive Democratic nominee. “I’m more than the presumptive, I’m going to be the Democratic nominee,” Biden said, laughing….

Biden is leaning heavily into a strategy he’s turned to in the past: casting his critics as “elites” who aren’t in step with the average Democratic voter.

Axios’ Andrew Solender notes that this response has been, “met with mixed reaction on Capitol Hill. One senior House Democrat, asked if they think the letter will succeed in extinguishing pressure on Biden to withdraw, told Axios: ‘No.’” On the other hand, the Washington Post reports that Biden, “won new support for his reelection bid Monday and headed off further defections among Democratic lawmakers as Congress returned to Capitol Hill, at least temporarily stemming a tide of dissent at the outset of what could be a pivotal week in his fight for political survival.”

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is curious about whether Biden’s arguments are intrinsically compelling. Some of them are! Biden makes a strong appeal to legitimacy, democracy, and fairness when pointing out that won the party nomination and received the overwhelming share of the primary vote. To replace him now would be a serious rebuke to that process. That ain’t beanbag.

Biden’s other strong argument is that he’s heard all of this caterwauling before. It is true that a lot of Democratic Party elites didn’t think he would win the 2020 nomination, then worried he would not win the 2020 general election, and then fretted about the possibility of a red wave during the 2022 midterms. A running theme of Drezner’s World has been the cloud of pervasive gloom hovering over the Beltway for the past year or so regarding Biden. Given the political history of the last four years, one can understand Biden’s perspective.

I confess, however, that reading and listening to Biden also caused me to sprain my eyes from rolling them too hard too quickly. The first absurdity is Biden railing against “the elites” while exempting the Morning Joe hosts,¹ as well as himself, from that label. As noted previously in Spoiler Alerts, the American tendency to rail against elites without acknowledging one’s own membership in that class is an annoying and hypocritical national trait:

American elites do not admit that they are elites…. because to declare oneself a member of the elite is to say, quite plainly, that one occupies a higher social station than others in America. And in a country that still clutches fiercely to an egalitarian ideal of society, this is neither an easy nor a comfortable declaration to make….

Even people who qualify as elites in every sense of the word can find a way to think of themselves as an outsider. This has been a theme of American elites for quite some time. George Kennan was the perfect embodiment of the foreign policy elite in this country, but one would not get that sense from his autobiography or biography. Kennan’s self-conception was that he was an awkward kid from Wisconsin who never fit in at Princeton or any of the later august societies he joined….

This is how elites in this country can rationalize the act of punching down. They don’t think of themselves as elites, which means that they are not punching down.

That is hardly the only hypocrisy contained in Biden’s statements. Sure, he won the Democratic Party nomination but it’s not like the deck wasn’t stacked in his favor. Did the DNC force Biden to participate in primary debates? Nope! When Biden dares his critics to challenge him at the Democratic National Convention, does anyone believe that the DNC would actually let that happen? No again! There is also the fact that the loudest Democratic voices calling on Biden to step aside are elected officials.

There is also Biden’s claim that he talked to voters and concluded that they want him at the top of the ticket and no one else. While I am sure that is what people are telling Biden to his face, that is not what they are telling pollsters. Last week, for example, CNN reported: “Three-quarters of US voters say the Democratic Party would have a better shot at holding the presidency in 2024 with someone other than President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.” That same poll showed Vice President Kamala Harris — the only feasible replacement for Biden at this late date — to outperform him in a head-to-head matchup against Trump. The New York Times post-debate polling revealed a similar dynamic, as did a more recent Politico poll.

Finally, nothing in Biden’s letter, his call-in to Morning Joe, or his interview last Friday with George Stephanopoulos has reassured those who watched his debate performance that he was merely the victim of a bad night. Any event where he acquits himself well is counterbalanced by statements that are less reassuring. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes a list of questions that Biden’s debate performance have raised — and none of which are addressed by Biden in his responses on Monday.

As the Washington Post’s Matt Viser reports, the gap is growing between what Biden sees and what other Democrats see:

Over a span of 72 hours, as Biden campaigned in two key swing states and returned to Washington, what became increasingly clear is just how differently things look to the Democratic standard-bearer than to many in his party.

Where they see polls predicting political calamity, he sees a dead heat. Where they see a rapidly aging man who should sit for cognitive tests, he sees no problem that can’t be fixed with a display of energy and force. Where they see a 90-minute debate that showcased the state of his mental acuity, he sees it simply as a “bad night” as he fended off a jet-lag-induced cold.

Everyone in the party concedes that it is Biden’s decision — and his alone — whether to continue his reelection bid. But the self-professed congenital optimist now finds himself trying to convince a party that has grown increasingly pessimistic, with an increasing number of Democrats fearful that unless things change, Republicans are poised for a landslide victory and Donald Trump is headed for the White House (emphasis added)

But in the eyes of a president who often relishes the mentality of an underdog, he has taken a posture of Joe Biden Against the World (or at least some in his party).

Monday was the first day since the debate when Biden played offense rather than defense against his friendly critics. He advanced some better arguments for why he should stay in the race. If he wants to stay in the race, then that is what will happen. But no one should pretend that Biden’s new arguments settle the issue. For that to happen, he is going to need his last campaign to be his best campaign.

1. This made Biden’s suggestion during the interview to Mika Brzezinski that she, “ask your brother about it in Poland!” regarding NATO unintentionally hilarious.