by Kevin Ellis
In the greatest TV show of all time, The West Wing, President Josiah Bartlet hides his multiple sclerosis from his staff and the country while running for president. Only his wife, Abigail, and his doctors know the truth. When the president faints in the Oval Office, his communications director, Toby Ziegler, starts to suspect the truth.
Chief of Staff Leo McGarry tells the president they must bring Toby into the circle of trust. When they do so, they convince themselves that Toby will understand, sympathize with the president, and help them figure out a way out of their lie. They were very, very wrong.
As McGarry ushers Toby into the Oval Office, he says: “Toby, take it easy in there.’’
Toby does not take it easy. Indeed, he goes on a rant about fraud on the voters and a coup by the president and his closest advisor, not to mention the president’s wife, who happens to be a doctor who is treating him for MS!!!
At the end, when tempers have cooled, the president says: “I don’t know. It might have been unbelievably stupid.’’
This is television, of course, and the parallel to the situation with President Biden is not exact. Biden’s people will argue it’s not even close, that I am falling into Trump’s talking points and the “bed wetters’’ in the Democratic party who are deserting Biden and handing the election to a sexually assaulting felon who has promised to put journalists in prison and open internment camps at the border.
But the scene hits pretty close to the mark.
Let’s leave Trump out of this for the moment. Let’s also leave out the establishment media like the New York Times editorial board, New Yorker Magazine editor David Remnick, Times columnist Tom Friedman, and many others who have called for Biden to step aside.
Let’s just take a look at what we saw last week and come to grips with it.
First, in a nationally televised debate seen by 50 million-plus people, we saw an 81-year-old president struggle to string words together for 90 minutes.
When he wasn’t talking, Biden had the slackened look of an old man—absent, unable to participate, with open mouth and dazed eyes. When he was talking, he couldn’t get the words out and eventually gave up. He stopped in the middle of his two minutes of time, unable to go on.
When Biden had the opportunity to press his case for a second term and lay out the Trump threat to abortion rights, NATO, and the rule of law, he wandered back to his comfort zone—someplace in the post-World War II era that no longer exists, something about Herbert Hoover, the morals of an alley cat, and worst of all, his golf game.
Biden has become that grandfather at dinner who harkens back to a friendlier time, with good guys and bad guys, where everything was a little clearer. He can’t seem to understand why he is losing this next generation of voters over Gaza, Crypto, and being the head of a party that torpedoed Bernie Sanders in 2016 for the presidency.
I don’t know whether Biden should withdraw from the race or not. He can still win. He has a team of veterans around him to protect and shepherd him through to the nomination and the election. But I doubt it.
We have become a country obsessed with celebrity and performance. And for every lie Trump has told in the debate, for every terrible thing he represents, for all the horrible people he hangs out with, with his destruction of the presidency and our own limited ability to be civil and generous with each other, it is Biden who is suddenly the target of discussion. It is Biden who failed to level with us – and himself.
This debate has forced potential voters to ask some pretty difficult questions. Did Biden have a conversation with his chief of staff about his clear physical and possibly cognitive decline? Did he have it with his wife? Did anyone in the White House have the courage to tell Biden NOT to run for re-election? Who asked the tough questions about how the public would respond? Who was the Toby Ziegler in the room? Why did his staff tell reporters for months that, in private, Biden was great? Why didn’t someone like Barack Obama go to him two years ago and urge him to make way for the next generation?
My guess is that no one spoke up, but we won’t know until the post-Biden books are written.
All this leads to the most uncomfortable question of all: so now what?
Let’s do the civics lesson. The Democratic Party is a private non-profit organization—a kind of club—that makes its own rules. The same is true for the Republicans. Each party holds primary elections in each state, and the winner accumulates delegates who pledge to vote for the nominee at the party convention. The Democrats are meeting in August to nominate Biden.
It is nearly impossible for anyone to force Biden out of the campaign. He holds the delegates. The Constitution has nothing to do with any of this. For another candidate to replace Biden, the president would have to withdraw from the race. He then has to decide what to do with his delegates. He can recommend that they go to the convention and vote for his vice president, Kamala Harris. Or he can urge the convention to be “open,’’ which means the delegates go to Chicago and fight it out old-school: smoke-filled rooms and all that.
We would see a stampede of next-generation politicians wanting to be president: Vice President Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and others. Back-room meetings would be held, and deals would be made. Can the Democrats bypass Harris, who is unpopular, for a new face and risk angering black voters?
It would all be a crap shoot. And no one knows how it will come out in the end. But one thing is for sure, even as you read this, things are moving. Conversations are happening all over the Democratic party. And it is entirely unclear whether Biden can meet the moment.