On Tuesday evening in the Mellon Auditorium in Washington DC, US president Joe Biden invites North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) secretary general Jens Stoltenberg, with whom he is sharing the stage, to turn his back so that Biden can garland him with the US’s highest civilian honour: the presidential medal of freedom. Stoltenberg, a walking advertisement for Scandinavian unflappability, seems genuinely humbled.
It’s always a bizarrely delicate operation, this hanging of ceremonial medals in public, and after Biden had draped the medal across the Norwegian’s chest, it dawns on everyone that he will now have to tie the clasp.
For the many millions of Americans who claim to revere and even love their ageing president, the next 10 seconds are truly slow-motion and nerve-racking. Here are the 81-year-old fingers of the most heavily scrutinised mind and body on the planet required to summon the dexterity to fasten a clasp on live television. If the esteemed medal falls from Stoltenberg’s shoulders, the tabloids and the malicious will have a field day. Anyone who cares about Biden – or even human dignity – will have felt a tightening of their stomach for those few seconds. Just: let him get through this, at least.
And the moment passes. Biden claps the Norwegian statesman on the back. He has done it. Disaster is averted – for this hour. The moment hold eerie intimations of the immediate aftermath of the debate night in Atlanta when Jill Biden was filmed praising her husband, in tone-deaf denial of the ghastly and alarmed national reviews, on his performance. A short video clip shows the First Lady standing in front of her husband at a private gathering that night and issuing the praise: “Joe, you did such a great job, you answered every question. You knew all the facts.” Biden smiled and held his hands in communion like a bashful schoolboy delighted at the teacher’s commendation after a spelling contest. It was a disastrously ill-conceived piece of political showmanship.
The moment seemed to confirm that the Biden family and the president’s immediate advisers were unable or unwilling to acknowledge that what had happened had been an unprecedented electoral catastrophe. Biden’s mind and body had betrayed him at precisely the wrong moment, in front of a live audience of 50 million people. He had sounded and looked enfeebled, hollowed out, even lost. There have been few more public demonstrations of the merciless cruelty of the ageing process.
Since then, even Donald Trump’s Republican strategists have watched on in muted fascination as the Democratic Party has appeared to invent, in real time, a manual on how to demonstrate a collective political nervous breakdown. The Biden White House has persisted with the message that the president simply fell victim to a bad night, caused by a cold. Chaotic White House press briefings defined by questions about Parkinson’s specialists; private calls with Democrats and donors and a pre-recorded interview with ABC during which Biden declared that he would step down only if “the Lord Almighty” came down and told him to do so: nothing helped to ease the doubt.
Biden himself delivers cheery but steely declarations that he is going nowhere. His Democratic colleagues dither for more than a week, with a vocal minority – still fewer than a dozen – explicitly calling for him to step aside. The most prominent of those calls come on Wednesday, when Vermont senator Peter Welch writes a heavy-hearted opinion piece in the Washington Post.
“The latest data makes it clear that the political peril to Democrats is escalating,” he writes. “States that were once strongholds are now leaning Republican. These new shifts – in Minnesota, New Hampshire, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia – must be taken seriously, not denied or ignored. The good news is that president Biden has united the party and created a deep bench that can defeat Trump. Vice-president Harris is a capable, proven leader and we have other electable, young, energising Democratic governors and senators in swing states. We have asked President Biden to do so much for so many for so long. It has required unmatched selflessness and courage. We need him to put us first, as he has done before. I urge him to do it now.”
On the other hand, explicit pledges of undying support have come from the black caucus, from the Irish-American Democrats, along with guarded support from old Biden allies such as Senate leader Chuck Schumer. Even 83-year-old South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn rows back on earlier equivocations by repeating the old mantra: “We’re ridin’ with Biden.” The most heavily interpreted comment comes courtesy of Nancy Pelosi, the 84-year-old former House speaker who retains a vast influence over the party.
“It is up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” she says on Wednesday morning. “We are all encouraging him to make that decision. I want him to do whatever he decides to do. And that’s the way it is. Whatever he decides, we go with. I think it is really important that we let him deal with this Nato conference. This is a very big deal. Let’s hold off. Whatever you are thinking, either tell someone privately but you don’t have to put that out on the table until we see how we go this week.”
The careful phrasing is loosely decoded by many as: Joe Biden is an old friend and our nominee and if he decides to run, so be it. But the door for him to leave the race is wide open and everyone is silently pointing towards it with terrified smiles frozen on faces; if he decides to walk through it, he will be lavished with love and the warmest of praise. But if he doesn’t, everybody fears the worst.
[ Fundraising fears behind George Clooney’s call for Joe Biden to step downOpens in new window ]
This arrives in tandem with an opinion piece written by George Clooney in that morning’s New York Times. Easy to imagine the frosty atmosphere around the Biden breakfast table as they read confirmation that even Gorgeous George, who stood arm in arm with Joe at a lavish fundraiser in LA in mid-June, has lost the faith:
“Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign. The George Stephanopoulos interview only reinforced what we saw the week before. As Democrats, we collectively hold our breath or turn down the volume whenever we see the president, whom we respect, walk off Air Force One or walk back to a mic to answer an unscripted question.”
Clooney’s piece is written empathetically: at the outset he declares his love for Joe Biden and stresses that this is simply a case of age taking its toll. Clooney is a powerful A-list star in the twilight years of Hollywood. But he is still just an actor. Strangely, many of the comments from the public to the piece react angrily to the presumption of an elite in attempting to influence the outcome of the Democratic electoral process. And in one of those blackly comic turns of which he is capable, Donald Trump weighs in on social media, barking that “Clooney should get out of politics and go back to television. Movies never really worked for him!”
On Thursday, the closing day of the Nato summit ends with Biden submitting himself to that rarest of events: a live press conference, with questions from the floor. All day, the mood in the Democratic rooms on Capitol Hill has reportedly been dark, with a brewing anger at the sense that the Biden team has effectively disguised the extent of the president’s decline for more than a year. It is suffocatingly warm in Washington this week: the heat can only have added to the irritation. Now, it seems, the Democrats are writhin’ with Biden. The entire scenario presents a huge, unwieldy political machine on the verge of a historic malfunction. Conflicting themes – the abiding fear of blowing the most important US election in living memory; loyalty to a sitting president who romped home in the Democratic primary; impatience at the Age of Gerontocracy defined by Biden’s belief in his limitlessness and the ongoing influence of those other hardy postwar flowers who refuse to relinquish the stage – and the raw fear that the Democrats are about to lose the White House, the Senate, the House – all contribute to the collective vexation and contradictory messages.
The Biden press conference is advertised by the news channels as though it were a 2024 version of the moon landing. None of this political psychodrama is bad for ratings. Originally slated for 5.30pm, it is just before seven o’clock before Biden takes to the podium. By then, he has already committed a hugely unfortunate verbal blunder in front of his international colleagues, introducing Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as “president Putin”. He corrects himself and Zelenskiy makes light of the error. But it is a blow: another wide-open opportunity for mockery and derision. And in his opening response to the very first question from the floor, he refers to his vice-president, Kamala Harris, as “vice-president Trump”.
But he answers questions for close on 50 minutes. At times he rambles. Occasionally he coughs. And then at other times, when reflecting on his foreign policy record or his efforts on Israel, he slows his words and finds his rhythm, giving a forceful reminder of his vast reservoir, his half-century experience as a political heavyweight. He appears unmoved by a new poll showing that some 54 per cent of his supporters believe he should step aside. Nor does he mention a poll that has him tied with Donald Trump. He is less combative than earlier on Monday morning, when he sent a defiant open letter to his Democratic colleagues inviting anyone who wished to challenge him to do so. He gives a sly critique of the notion that vulnerable representatives fear that his unpopularity in the “down ballot” races, noting that when he was a young politician running in Delaware, the outcome of a presidential election never helped him.
This is a more reflective Biden, arguing that the historians have lauded him for pushing through more progressive legislation than any president since Lyndon Johnson. He gives this answer when asked what has changed from his original intention to be a “bridging president” who would pave a path for the next generation. “What changed is the gravity of the situation I inherited,” he says.
“We’ve never been here before,” he says later, with wonderment in his voice. He is talking of the dangerous domestic political climate: the impending election, which is frequently described by the American commentariat as “existential”. But he could just as easily be talking about the unprecedented maze into which the Democratic Party has wandered and that Biden insists he can and will guide them through, as he has done in the past.
For his loyalists and friends – in so far as there can be true friendships in politics – it must make for a poignant hour. There are flashes of the Joe Biden they want and need in this broiling summer: the wily, charming, streetwise survivor of Capitol Hill, the indefatigable beater of all odds. But the overall effect is like that of a flickering bulb. Nobody can be sure that the light will not go out. And as night falls in Washington, Democratic voices continue to ask Biden to leave. Jim Hines from Connecticut is first, and the roll call continues. They won’t fall silent. Because the fear of the next big mistake, the next “bad night”, cannot be vanquished.
So, a long weekend beckons. On Monday, Biden is due to accept an award in Austin, Texas, in the Lyndon Johnson library. In 1968, in announcing that he would not accept a nomination for a second term, Johnson memorably referred to the presidency as “the awesome duties of this office”.
They are certainly that. If Biden does decide to pass the torch of his own volition, he could not choose a more appropriate venue in which to deliver what would become a cherished valedictory.
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