Democrats Prepare to Throw Biden Overboard

‘P resident Biden,” the New York Times reports today, “is facing an alarming level of doubt from inside his own party.” And so, as night follows day, President Biden is facing an alarming level of doubt from within the national media, too.

The crucial statistic in the Times’ roundup was not that Biden’s approval rating is at just 33 percent, or that “more than two-thirds of independents also now disapprove of the president’s performance,” or that “only 13 percent of American voters said the nation was on the right track,” or even that, post-Dobbs, “abortion rated as the most important issue for 5 percent of voters.” The crucial statistic in the Times’ roundup was that “only 26 percent of Democratic voters said the party should renominate [Biden] in 2024.” Why? Because therein rests the permission that the press needed to retreat to its pre-2019 assumptions. Après cela, le déluge.

Apologists for Joe Biden — and for the media’s coverage of him — like to insist that his shortcomings have been covered amply since he first announced he was running for president. But that isn’t quite right. It is true that Biden was frequently cast in a negative light during the 2019 primaries: Back when there was a chance that someone else might be the nominee, Biden was often said to be too old, or too gaffe-prone, or too racist, or too law-and-order-ish to be the nominee. It is not true, however, that these criticisms continued in earnest once Biden had secured the Democratic nomination. Remember those SNL skits that showed Biden as a confused, mendacious, out-of-touch, geriatric has-been? Remember how they stopped once he represented the only chance to beat Donald Trump? The same thing happened in the press. In December 2019, Joe Biden was ancient and ineloquent. By the summer of 2020, he was the experienced survivor of a debilitating stutter. By 2021, only a rotter would have suggested that he might be over the hill. “Casual ageism,” Jill Lawrence wrote in USA Today last summer, “is a staple of the conservative arsenal against the president.” Not only was there nothing at all to “the right’s narrative about Biden’s acuity,” Lawrence went on to explain, but “the age-related conservative offensive reprise[d] the blatant psychological projection of the Trump era.” “Fundamentally,” she concluded, “the tactic is out of whack with reality.”

By “reality,” Lawrence really meant “the Democrats’ priorities.” And what a difference 14 approval-rating points have made! When Lawrence penned her column, Biden’s approval–disapproval split was about even, a “comeback” was supposedly on the horizon, and chatter about replacing him on the 2024 ticket hadn’t yet really begun in earnest. Now, Biden is the most unpopular president in a century, the idea of a “comeback” seems absurd on its face, and the Democrats are wondering aloud if they will be able to get rid of him without a bloody fight. In the Times’ poll, 74 percent of Democrats, including 94 percent of Democrats under the age of 30, said they wanted a different nominee in 2024. Among that supermajority, “concerns about his age ranked at the top of the list” of reasons for wishing he’d retire after one term. How does “casual ageism” become “distinct challenges”? That’s how. How does “the right’s narrative” become “an uncomfortable issue for [Biden] and his party”? That’s how. How do we move from talking about an “age-related conservative offensive” to gleefully printing quotes from a voter who compares “the president to zombies”? That’s how. This isn’t about the truth. It’s about the polls.

And it’s about ideology, too. Progressivism isn’t looking so hot right now, is it? Spurred on by excessive spending, inflation has hit its highest level in 40 years. Unwilling to take on his own party, the president has cast himself as an enemy of domestic energy production at the exact moment that gas prices have gone through the roof. Held hostage by some of the looniest people in America, the Democratic Party has absorbed every outlandish fad it could find. Democrats have been given unified control of Washington for the first time in a decade, and the result has been that “more than three-quarters of registered voters see the United States moving in the wrong direction.”

It is extremely unlikely that any of these pitfalls would have been avoided had Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or Pete Buttigieg been president instead — indeed, one of the biggest complaints one hears about Biden from his own side is that he is not progressive enough. Yet the fact that Biden seems so old and so confused and so chronically out of touch has provided progressives with a valuable opportunity nevertheless: They can argue that the problem isn’t their policies, but the man selling them. “Oh, all that mess?” they can tell voters, if they manage to persuade Biden to make way for new blood in 2024. “Don’t worry about all that. Our new guy is young — and he’s on it.”