By Jonathan Alter
As regular readers know, I’ve spent the last two years arguing here and in The New York Times that President Biden should not run for reelection. Doing so is selfish, short-sighted in terms of securing his legacy, and wrong-headed, as he has admitted, in the assumption that he is the only Democrat who can beat Donald Trump. With no polarizing progressive in sight, any of a dozen Democrats — Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Amy Klobuchar, and Roy Cooper among them — would stomp Trump in November and put this appalling era in the rearview mirror. But with primary filing deadlines already passing, it ain’t gonna happen.
So my New Year’s Resolution is to stop agitating for Biden’s withdrawal and start figuring out how to help him get reelected and save the republic. Let’s not mince words. There’s no way to minimize the political blow the president sustained on February 8 when Special Counsel Robert Hur spent much of his 345-page report documenting Biden’s brain freezes. While deciding, thank God, not to indict him for his carelessness in handling documents from his time as vice president (unlike Trump, he immediately complied with requests to return them), Hur did offer a devastating eight-word political indictment, concluding that Biden is a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
The fact that this was a hit job by a Trump appointee is cold comfort. It was the worst kind of political wound — new facts to confirm a preexisting narrative, in this case, the presidential dementia that spin doctors diagnose around the clock on Fox and other rightwing outlets. So, as Lenin asked: What Is To Be Done?
No comments:
Post a Comment