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President Joe Biden ran for reelection to save democracy. In the end, he came to the shattering realization he could only do so by ceding power himself.
Biden reached the decision to end his campaign after days in isolation at his Delaware beach house with Covid-19 and after watching many Democrats desert the president who led them to power just four years ago.
In offering to hand over power in service of what he saw as the national interest, he struck a contrast with former President Donald Trump, who fought bitterly against leaving office after losing a free and fair election to Biden in 2020. It’s ironic that Republicans who whitewashed Trump’s election-stealing effort are now accusing Democrats of crushing the will of primary voters who voted for the president’s reelection bid.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” Biden said in a letter he posted to X on Sunday afternoon. “And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”
Biden quickly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, but his late-in-the campaign decision sets off a potentially chaotic and divisive rush to rally behind a Democratic nominee in the month before the party convention in Chicago and less than four months before the election.
The Biden campaign effectively ended in the 20 first, faltering minutes of his debate against Trump last month, when the president looked confused, exhausted and was unable to take the attack to his foe or to make an effective case for himself.
His struggles validated concerns of majorities of voters that he would be too old for a second term that would have ended when he is 86. His fervent efforts to save his campaign in television interviews and campaign appearances only exacerbated the concerns about his showing in the CNN debate in Atlanta. Three weeks of severe erosion in his political position saw a daily drip of defections from Democratic lawmakers, while party grandees like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed from behind the scenes. The drying up of donor cash also seemed to make Biden’s campaign unsustainable. Even if he wanted to go on, it became clear that he couldn’t.
Still Biden, proud and defiant, resisted every effort to push him out of the race, insisting, along with his loyal inner core of staff, that there was no other Democrat better qualified or more likely to beat Trump, whom the president views as an existential threat to American democracy and the country’s soul.
But in the end, Biden could not find a way to make voters unsee the poignant picture of an 81-year-old commander in chief who appeared to have seriously declined and was stumbling in the debate.
Legislative record overshadowed by inflation
Biden’s impressive legislative record, which bears comparison with any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson, was one of the reasons why he resisted attempts to push him out of the race, saying he wanted to finish the job.
Becoming the oldest president ever elected, he was 78 when he took office. Biden declared in his inaugural address that the American political system of checks and balances had held and triumphed over Trump’s election lies – not knowing at the time that the ex-president’s threat to democracy would only grow.
The new president immediately set about tackling the Covid-19 pandemic, the worst public health emergency in 100 years, which had been exacerbated by Trump’s mismanagement and politicization of his own government’s public health guidelines.
Biden enacted a $1.9 trillion economic rescue package that the White House credited with helping to drive unemployment to near 50-year lows and spurring a faster rebound for the US economy than for other developed nations. Biden also passed a $750 billion health care, tax and climate bill known as the Inflation Reduction Act and a bipartisan infrastructure package that had eluded other recent presidents.
But Biden badly underestimated the threat from inflation, which rose to 40-year-highs. While the cost of living has eased, many Americans are still feeling the punishing blowback from high grocery prices and elevated interest rates – which offered Trump an opening.
Overseas, Biden responded forcibly to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, becoming the most important leader of the West since the end of the Cold War with his efforts to reinvigorate NATO. But the chaotic US exit from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 hurt Biden’s self-proclaimed status as a foreign policy expert, and his handling of Israel’s war in Gaza damaged his standing with parts of his base.
A painful decision for a president who abandoned two previous campaigns
The soul searching that Biden endured led to a decision that in some ways represents a humiliating end for a politician who spent years pursuing the highest office and was frequently passed over in his climb to power.
It is not an easy thing for a president — the most powerful person in the world — to separate his personal ambition from the fate of the nation. And the debilitating distancing that took place between top Democrats and Biden in recent weeks was a cruel lesson in the brutality of politics, given that the president had ejected Trump from power after the most tumultuous presidency in modern times. It must be an especially bitter pill for Biden that he will not be able to take the fight to Trump, who has spent the last three years saying he was too infirm and mentally diminished to effectively serve as president.
The ignominy of being effectively forced to shelve his reelection bid will also be painful for the president since he’s had to abandon two White House campaigns before — in 1987 after he was caught plagiarizing a British politician and in 2008 after he failed to gain traction in a blockbuster race that was dominated by Obama and former first lady Hillary Clinton. Sunday’s denouement was also the latest harrowing turn in a life of tragedy that saw Biden lose his first wife and infant daughter to a car crash when he’d been elected to the Senate from Delaware. He had to bury another child in 2015 when his beloved son Beau died of brain cancer. And in recent years, the president has been dealing with the pressure and pain of helping his other son Hunter through the horror of addiction and a personal crisis that culminated in a criminal conviction on a gun charge earlier this year.
Given his political and personal history, it was no surprise that Biden would dig in his heels as calls mounted from within the Democratic Party for him to quit the race.
But the growing possibility that his legacy would be remembered not for ousting the most aberrant president in modern American history but for paving the way for an even more extreme second Trump term, set in motion the political forces that would extinguish his hopes.
If Biden’s gamble pays off and another Democratic candidate beats Trump, he may go down in history as one of the most successful one-term presidents in history. He will have enabled such a triumph by putting his own ambition on hold for the good of his party and the country. But his late exit will raise questions over whether he has saddled his party — and a Democratic successor — with an impossible task in standing up a campaign in a matter of days against a united Republican Party that emerged from its convention in Milwaukee last week convinced it was on a path to victory.
Seeking a second term at the age of 81 turned out to be an impossible mission — and, despite his efforts, Biden may have saved his party huge problems had he reached the same conclusion before the primary season started.
If history is a guide, Biden’s rock bottom approval ratings will spike in the coming days. When Johnson announced he would not run for a second term in his own right in 1968, he was greeted by massive crowds in subsequent public events around the country. Johnson made his move in March, during the primary campaign, and his departure set off a chaotic chain of events, worsened by the assassination of Democratic primary candidate Robert F. Kennedy, and a violence-plagued convention in Chicago — which will also host this year’s event. In the end, the eventual Democratic nominee, then-Vice Pre?sident Hubert Humphrey, lost to Republican Richard Nixon. Years earlier, in March 1952, Harry S. Truman, another Democratic president, had decided not to seek his own second term. The Democratic nominee that year, Adlai Stevenson, lost to Republican Dwight Eisenhower.
But if Biden does enjoy a burst of support for his selflessness – and even nostalgia for the successes of what is now a lame duck presidency – it might not translate to his successor.
No modern president has ever bowed out of the presidential race at such a late date. And Harris, or whoever picks up the baton, now faces one of the most daunting missions in electoral history, against an opponent who has already proved there is nothing he will not do to win.