Bidenworld’s Darkest Hour
Biden may find the next 10 days to two weeks even more challenging than even the past 72 hours. As the polling numbers stream in, Democratic elected officials and fundraisers are inclined not to give the president or his team the slightest margin for error or benefit of the doubt. To say they have lost faith would be putting it far too mildly.
At the end of a weekend in which the question of whether Joe Biden should stand down as his party’s de facto presidential nominee was the singular, all-consuming topic of conversation among members of the Democratic political class, the president and his family were gathered at Camp David for a Vogue photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz. But at the same time, and more significantly, Bidenworld was working the phones, endeavoring mightily to shut down the chatter du jour, tout de suite.
The results of those calls were apparent soon enough. In quick succession on Sunday night, The New York Times and AP posted stories with nearly identical headlines, ledes, and gists: The president’s wife, children, and grandchildren were of one mind that, in the face of pressure from his party to quit the race, Biden should, in effect, steal a page from Winston Churchill—never yield, never give in, never, never, never. Both stories also included details (confirmed by my own reporting) that caused eyebrows to arch or eyes to roll up and down the Acela corridor: that Jill and Hunter Biden were the most adamant voices urging the patriarch to stand tall and plow forward, full-speed ahead.
The carefully choreographed reports from Camp David were part and parcel of a larger Bidenworld strategy, crafted and executed on the fly in the 72 hours after the disaster in Dogwood City, to quell doubts, quiet dissent, and keep Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket. And that strategy appears, at this hour and at least on the surface, to be working about as well as any survival strategy could in the aftermath of a public performance as cataclysmic as any in the history of presidential politics.
Sure, the punditocracy, including some scribes Biden has known forever and not just respected but revered, has been all but unanimous (and lethally so) in its collective judgment that the time has come for Joe to go. But not a single national or statewide Democratic elected official has echoed that call. The grandest of Democratic Party grandees—Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi—almost immediately declared their continued support. While a few thunderstruck donors have opened the door to “conversations” concerning Biden’s viability, most of the party’s biggest buck-rakers have remained on mute. And even among many of those arguing most ardently, if sotto voce, that Biden should be (gently) shown the door, the prevailing mood shifted over the weekend from hair-on-fire agita to deep-sigh resignation.