Should Joe stay or should he go?
It looked as though that painful question might be answered when I heard that President Joe Biden was set to hold the most anticipated news conference in recent political history.
Since a growing number of prominent Democrats were calling for Biden to step aside and bow out of the 2024 campaign, or at least address the serious questions raised by his halting debate performance, the rumor mill among my media colleagues was running at full blast. By the time the president faced the media, I had convinced myself that he was about to announce something earth-shattering, like his exit from the presidential race. My imagination already was racing ahead to such other sticky questions as whether he would endorse Vice President Kamala Harris in an open convention when the Democrats meet in Chicago next month.
But, as it turned out, that earthquake was not to be, no matter how much it might relieve our suspense. Instead, the president faced the press like a man with a mission — to show the world he still has what it takes to be elected at age 81, older than any other presidential nominee in the nation’s history.
His effort was not flawless. Before the news conference, as he was introducing Volodymyr Zelensky at a NATO ceremony, he referred to the Ukrainian president as “President Putin.” Yikes. During the presser itself, he called Vice President Harris “Vice President Trump” and referred to taking advice from “my commander in chief,” before correcting himself to say “the chief of staff of the military.”
He even accidentally undersold himself, referring at one point to how the economy “created 2,000 jobs just last week,” an apparent reference to the recent jobs report of more than 200,000 jobs created in June.
In a moment I found poignant, a reporter asked him ”What changed?” The reporter was referring to the 2020 election when Biden already was set to be the oldest president in the nation’s history and spoke of being a “bridge to a younger generation of Dem leaders.” Did he change his mind? Biden was asked.
“What changed,” the president responded, “was the gravity of the situation I inherited in terms of the economy, our foreign policy and domestic division.”
It was an answer that fit well with the “let’s finish the job theme” on which he has campaigned since the beginning of his bid for a second term. On paper, he has a lot about which to boast and like just about every other politician, he’s delighted to tell us about it.
But like his Hollywood pal George Clooney wrote in an open letter published as a New York Times op-ed, Biden has “won many of the battles he’s faced. But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can.”
As one who’s not all that many years behind Biden or, for that matter, his 78-year-old opponent Donald Trump, I know what it means to wonder how much longer I have to wait until my family comes to take the car keys away from me.
There have been questions about whether Biden is too old for the job for years now. Those questions simply took on a much higher level of urgency after the debate calamity. That shouldn’t obscure the alarming questions, posed by Democrats and others, about Project 2025, an expansive buffet of conservative policy proposals offered by the conservative Heritage Foundation to overturn decades of liberal policies and programs.
As I wrote recently in this column, Trump denies any knowledge of connection with the 900-page project, even though dozens of former Trump administration officials participated in its creation. Trump’s disavowal came after Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation’s president, said a bit ominously, “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.”
Such confrontational talk has become par for the course in Trumpworld. At least they understand an old saying we all should know by now: Elections have consequences.
Fortunately, word is getting around. The Project 2025 plan includes rolling back civil rights legislation, new restrictions on contraception and abortion access, and the purging of federal civil service workers who are not sufficiently loyal to the program.
Joe Biden understands the importance of this election. So should the rest of us.