Do Something. Don't Do Nothing.

The DNC needs to war game contingencies and show Biden the results.

I’ve been reminded in the last few days of the movie Gallipoli from 1981, which I saw when I was just a kid. I only remember one thing about it, and my memory is surely imperfect. But the emotional climax and central point, as I recall, was that the soldiers/friends at the heart of the film were ordered by their chain of command to charge into an attack that everybody from top to bottom knew was doomed. They would be destroyed for sure, but there was too much sunk cost and too much hubris to call it off or retreat. It resulted in a nihilistic slaughter. 

The dread and futility that director Peter Weir conveyed came with a message. Don’t let yourself, especially as a nation, get into such situations and don’t charge blindly into defeat for pride. And so my allusion is now obvious. Joe Biden, a true public servant and an excellent president, turned in a disastrous and indeed chilling debate performance on Thursday night, and we as a nation saw his odds of defeating Donald Trump fall from barely 50% (optimistically) to what the betting markets place at about 20% today. Millions of semi-engaged Americans lost the faith they’d need to bring to the ballot box in November and get behind Biden at an emotional level.

It’s not just that Biden got beaten in a tactical sense, and obviously Trump was horrifying, incoherent and dishonest. He should resign even more obviously than Biden, but obviously that’s not happening. To the point, the nation learned something quite alarming and had its fears confirmed, along with mine, that Biden is probably not fit to beat the aspiring autocrat OR be president in a second term. To be sure, I think he’s capable, along with his team, of steering the nation until Jan. 2025. But taken in combination with Biden’s frustrating refusal to sit for regular interviews or go on podcasts where he could press his case and show America he’s still capable and cogent, the debate was a devastating revelation that age is in fact overtaking him. His team has been covering up his day to day cognitive performance. It was not “one bad debate” like Barack Obama had against Mitt Romney. Seeing Biden piling on non-sequiturs in his more plausible replies and mumbling into dead ends and brain freezes was dreadful and tragic. For the first time I’m scared about November, and I haven’t slept well since. 

I was, I have to point out, an original One-Term-Joe Democrat. I was happy about Biden’s ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket in 2020 and felt like many that he was qualified, ready to be a strategic bipartisan legislator, a defender of American values overseas, a great advocate for NATO and a sharp critic of the rise of MAGA conservatism. I cast my vote with pride. But I also cast it with the hope and almost the expectation that he’d serve one term and work behind the scenes to ease the path for a natural successor. I thought he had that common sense and would relish going out on top with honor and the love of millions of Americans. I figured that announcement would come late in the term so as not to tag himself a lame duck president. But that didn’t happen. Despite my concern, I was and will remain a Biden Blue voter in order to stave off a Trump catastrophe. But we lost allies with this debate, votes we badly need, so now blindly plunging forward without changing course isn’t a sane option. 

It’s not clear to us citizens, with our limited information, what the options and odds of various scenarios for the Democrats are, but there are people well qualified to make detailed and rigorous assessments. The one thing I feel sure of at this uncertain place is that the DNC chairs (including by the way very plausible Dem nominees Gretchen Whitmer and Tammy Duckworth) should assemble a task force of strategists, former presidents and officials, wise men and women from the states, to quietly game out scenarios for the months ahead. Who would accept the challenge of running? What’s their national profile? Who’s made the best impression to focus groups in the last two years? What are the risks and rewards? Consider the wave of polling that will come in the next 10 days and factor that in. Put all options on the table, including sticking with Joe Biden, and PLAN. 

I want you to read Ezra Klein on the situation (NYT gift article) because he’s the expert that I’m not and his take is measured but strong. He was also an early advocate of Biden passing the torch, and he took all the flack that went along with stepping out with that bold opinion. But I’ll close by sharing my one key argument that I thought of before I read Klein say the same thing. 

To Biden supporters and Trump defiers who’ve cried foul over even raising the issue of Biden retiring, I pose this question. Doesn’t the DNC already have a contingency plan on paper in case Biden were to suffer a major health crisis before, during or after the convention? (They’d damn well better have one or they should all resign.) And what would common sense say? The DNC would act like a traditional political party and arrange a way for delegates to choose a new nominee. If it’s an obvious answer to what would happen for a Biden near-death health event, then it’s the same logic for a near-death political event. Maybe in the end the analysis (not our lay-people feelings) points to Biden staying put with a new tactical direction, but doing nothing is not an option. We hate that we are here, but it’s time to deal in reality and not some futile hope that charging into battle with insufficient numbers is going to work out.