Damon Linker on the Democrats’ Need to Replace Biden

Damon Linker recently had a piece in The Atlantic in which he made a compelling case for why the powers-that-be within the Democratic party (which should, of course, be registered Democratic voters but which sadly are various “elites” and operatives within the DNC) need to “wake up and stop sleepwalking toward disaster with Biden as its nominee.” In other words, it’s time to replace President Biden as the presumptive nominee in the upcoming presidential election.

Nevermind that the DNC should have recognized and respected the Democratic primary that’s been going on for months now rather than shoehorning Biden into the nomination; here now is a call from an establishment figure (a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania) for Democrats to “pick a new presidential candidate” – somthing that a lot of us have been saying for quite some time now.

Following is an excerpt from Linker’s February 13 Altantic piece.

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[P]artisan Democrats, from the president on down, responded with anger and defensiveness to [the recently released] Hur report. This is so unfair! How dare he use his office for a partisan hit job! To which I’m inclined to respond: Stop whining! The reason Hur’s comments seemed damaging is that they confirmed what most of the country already believes: Biden is too old and frail for the job he holds right now. So the prospect of his serving another four years is a reasonable source of concern (especially because his vice president is as unpopular as he is).

How did we end up in this situation? The lion’s share of the blame belongs to Biden himself. His decision to run for reelection, after initially indicating in 2019 that he’d probably serve only one term, is understandable in human respects but indefensible in political ones. It’s very common for an aging person – especially a man – to deny the truth about his decline and the need to pull back from responsibilities. Such transitions typically involve a painful, arduous struggle for any family facing the situation.

A good part of it is stubborn pride. But decline itself can impair judgment. Close family members, equally disinclined to accept the reality of what’s happening, can also become complicit in the self-deception. (I’m looking at you, Jill Biden.) Whatever the source of this problem, Biden is putting his self-regard ahead of the good of the country. As a result, both he and his party are badly undermining the most compelling rationale of the 2024 campaign, which is the need to do everything possible to prevent Trump from returning to the White House. If the prospect of a second Trump term really poses a dangerous threat to American democracy, why is the Democratic Party depending on an incumbent president with an approval number lower than Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, or even Trump himself were facing at the equivalent moment before their failed reelection bids?

Many Democrats will say it’s too late now. And that’s true if we’re talking about having an open primary season in which voters get to decide on an alternative nominee. Except for [author, activist and progressive Democrat Marianne Williamson’s and] Representative Dean Phillips’s quixotic primary challenge[s], the party has chosen to circle the wagons, angrily swatting away any talk of Biden making way for someone else. For God’s sake, why?

The Democratic Party appears to be stuck in a self-destructive contradiction, combining stupefying risk aversion (We can’t change horses midstream! It’d be chaos!) with unjustified arrogance (Republicans are such morons to nominate Trump-the-loser again! That plus Dobbs means we’re golden! We’re so likely to prevail, you might as well ignore the polls!). I’d wager that precisely this unstable mixture of emotional responses helped produce the kind of unseemly displays we’ve seen since Hur’s report, in which just about everyone on the center left has been pretending that everything would be fine and dandy with the Biden campaign if only the special counsel hadn’t played his dirty tricks and the media’s both-sides-ing hadn’t amplified his dishonest insinuations.

– Damon Linker
Excerpted from "Democrats Should Pick a New
Presidential Candidate Now"
The Atlantic
February 13, 2024

UPDATE: New Poll Shows Biden Losing Some of His 2020 Voters to Trump and Lagging in Support Among Women – John L. Dorman (Business Insider via Yahoo! News, March 2, 2024).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Democrats Challenging Biden
• Democratic Presidential Debate: Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips
• Sabrina Salvati: Quote of the Day – January 2, 2024
• “Let the People Decide”: Marianne Williamson on the DNC’s Efforts to Deny and Suppress the Democratic Process
• Thoughts on Cornel West’s Presidential Run
• Marianne Williamson: “Repairing Our Hearts Is Essential to Repairing Our Country”
• Voters, Not the DNC, Should Choose the Nominee
• Despite the Undemocratic Antics of the DNC, Marianne Williamson Plans on “Winning the Nomination”

Image: Damon Winter/The New York Times/Redux.