Everyone talking about Biden dropping out of the race because he cannot handle the campaign (as evidenced by a perceived disastrous debate performance) have to face the uncomfortable fact that the presidency is much more difficult than the campaign.
I don’t see how he can credibly hold onto the office if he quits now. It seems like an all or nothing proposition to me.
LBJ dropped out in '68. No one thought he should resign. It would have made a lot of sense for Biden not to run for a second term to begin with and I don’t see why anyone would think he would need to step down before the election.
Nah, Biden can say he wants to focus on his family and enjoy the next few years.
He’d catch a lot of flak and howling. He should have made that decision last year.
Ultimately he can tell the dissenters sayonara. He would be out of politics anyway.
I think he cares too much about the country to do that.
Nobody thought LBJ was senile. They thought he was a warmonger. I don’t see how the comparison is at all relevant here.
As far as optics I have been thinking that if Biden drops out as a candidate but stays on as president whoever replaces him is going to immediately face this attack that they’re part of this democratic machine weekend-at-bernieing the presidency for the next 6 months.
If it’s Harris I think it’ll be worse because it’ll look like she is only there to win the election, not do the job as she could be doing it now if Biden resigned.
IDK Biden straight up resigning and Harris becoming President and running as the incumbent candidate would be bold but it might be the best of bad options.
Your reasoning doesn’t work because Biden is not trying to do only one difficult thing. He’s both trying to be President and simultaneously campaign well . That’s harder than either one by themselves. Merely being President would be a reduction in difficulty level.
But it wouldn’t be a reduction that he could handle. The American public, IMHO, will not tolerate a president with an obvious impairment continuing in office. It would likewise be a massive national security problem necessitating either the invocation of the 25th Amendment or, failing that, a successful impeachment if said president does not voluntarily resign.
The fact that Trump is a manifestly unfit candidate himself does not minimize these concerns. In fact it amplifies them.
I do not know if Biden is clinically senile. But I think he is over the line of not being able to handle the rigors of his job now, and he is asking for the right to continue for four more years.
You’ll need to make a complete argument for that. Most charitably to your point, he proved he can’t do both simultaneously. Aside from the fallacious argument in your OP, that does not by itself speak to his ability to handle just one of the two hard things. Use your words instead of just repeating an unsupported claim.
It likely an uphill march. Staunch partisans have been spinning every minor gaff for both candidates into “obvious” signs of mental health issues or fading mental acuity for years. You should expect every new cry of wolf to be treated by extreme skepticism by anybody even remotely open to the possibility that this time there’s a real wolf. Maybe this time there really is a wolf. Don’t expect anyone to just take your word for it. The last couple hundred times it was a chihuahua or a rabbit without big sharp pointy teeth.
Biden is not going to drop out. Get ahold of your damn selves.
But that’s not the premise of the Question you are Just Asking.
You are saying that Biden can’t stop campaigning on the basis that the campaign is too hard because the Presidency is harder. But no one is saying that he should drop out on that basis.
Counterpoint: those people are wrong and should be ignored, and the rest of us aren’t required to face whatever dumb “uncomfortable facts” you want them to grapple with.
The Presidency isn’t about trading barbs with a carnival barker. It’s about getting your ideas implemented as policy. I don’t really care how the sausage is made behind the scenes. It’s working. Biden’s presidency has been one of the best in terms of policy achievements since Carter, even taking into account the unfavorable House and SCOTUS situations.
I might’ve considered a swap 6 months ago when there was more time to process the substitution.
Maybe. But that time is long past. Derailing Biden’s campaign at this point would pave a royal road for Trump to win. I will vote for a volleyball marked with a Biden-shaped bloodstain before I’ll back any other change at this point. Again, he’s performing admirably as President, and if he taps out next year, then I like Kamala’s odds to beat whoever the Repubs run.
This.
This is like those YouTube videos where a sports fan takes all of their expensive team merchandise and dramatically burns it all in a fire after their team loses a game.
But what if he literally dropped? It very possible, what then?
But what if he literally dropped? It very possible, what then?
It’s possible with the Cheeto too. Cross that bridge when we come to it.
Continuing for 7 months is entirely different than continuing for 4 years and 7 more months.
Remember Ronald Reagan? He was diagnosed with Alzheimers a few years after leaving office–and many people say they saw signs of it while he was in office.
Precisely. The assertion in the title of this thread is absurd.
When Biden ran in 2020, there was an assumption that he was only going to serve for four years. That assumption was based at least partially on what Biden himself said at the time.
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/11/biden-single-term-082129
Nobody then suggested that Biden couldn’t serve one term if he wasn’t willing or able to serve two. Because there would be no logical sense to it.
Biden is running for POTUS. He will not drop out of the race unless he absolutely has to, due to an emergency. But the idea that if 4 more years is too much, that automatically means that he can’t serve in his role for less than seven more months, there doesn’t seem to be any actual reason for that. Certainly nothing has been articulated in this thread.
Where do you see that “Biden himself” said this? I see an article that claims to quote hearsay from 4 anonymous sources.
Perhaps Biden allowed this to leak, perhaps someone took their own initiative, perhaps Politico cooked the story entirely. The only think we really know is that Biden didn’t say that.
That was only one contemporaneous article. Here’s another.
And as quoted there:
“Right now it’s a legitimate question to ask, just like it was legitimate to ask me when I was 29 years old running for the Senate, did I have enough judgment to be a senator,” Biden said. “Right now, my age has brought with it a significant amount of experience in government and hopefully wisdom and some sound judgment.”
Asked whether he would pledge to only serve one term if elected, Biden said he wouldn’t make such a promise but noted he wasn’t necessarily committed to seeking a second term if elected in 2020.
“I feel good and all I can say is, watch me, you’ll see,” Biden said. “It doesn’t mean I would run a second term. I’m not going to make that judgment at this moment.”
Biden himself said that he understood that his age was a factor at the time, and he at least hinted that due to that, he might not run again in 2024. And again, he was younger then than Trump is now.
It’s unusual for a candidate to indicate that he might not run for a second term before he is even elected. Then again, nobody has ever been elected to POTUS as old as Biden was in 2020, let alone today.