I have been pretty impressed by the reaction to the reaction to the release of the Republican special counsel’s report that smeared the president for being an old man. A good number of pundits, liberals included, took it as occasion to argue that Joe Biden should drop out and let someone else become the nominee. Those arguments were dumb, foolish and impractical, and the reaction to them, from a variety of quarters, has been as thorough and persuasive as I could ask for.
But, as my friend Alex Wise suggested recently, we shouldn’t leave it there. He and I were talking about the drop-out debate on his show, “Sea Change Radio.” At the end, he made his important observation: “John and I are not saying Joe Biden is about to win 400 electoral votes. We’re in a very tight, bifurcated country. … We’re not thinking this is a slam dunk. It’s going to be close. People should get out there and volunteer, knock on doors, register voters, talk to people. There’s no perfect candidate, and Joe Biden is the best candidate, though.”
In other words, even though Biden is democracy’s best chance of beating Donald Trump, that doesn’t mean he’ll win. Victory will be determined, as I said in my reply to Alex, by normal partisan politics.
This is important because in defending Biden from drop-out critics, we risk sounding like we're in denial about his weaknesses or, worse, like we know the future. No one knows the future. Everyone knows Biden is old. The race is going to be tight. That much we know for sure, from history and polling. Given what’s at stake, it’s better to err on the side of too much hell-raising, as I told Alex, rather than not enough.
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“There are a bunch of Democrats who would say, ‘it shouldn’t be this close. Biden should be winning by a mile,’” I said. “I don’t know why anybody’s saying that. We live in this reality. A lot of people like Donald Trump. A lot of people in this democracy don’t like democracy. That’s just a fact, and it has been a fact since the founding of the republic. …
“We need to shift our expectations,” I added, “about what we think America should be toward what America really is, and what America really is is a contest between two very different candidates who have an equal chance of winning, and what’s going to determine things is, like you said, normal partisan politics, get-out-the-vote, raising hell.”
Because the race will be so tight, we also need to shift our expectations to understand that, even though the presumptive candidates have an equal chance of winning, only one of them is getting assistance from a hostile foreign power. Trump needs the Russians to help him this year the same way they did in 2016. The Mueller report concluded “[t]he Russian government interfered … in sweeping and systematic fashion” and the Trump “campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
Trump isn’t the only one. His party needs help, too.
Contrary to 2016, when they were merely the passive recipients of Russian aid and comfort, in 2024, the House Republicans are consciously accepting it. They now know, if they did not already know, that the key witness in their impeachment inquiry of the president is a Russian intelligence asset. As I said last week, they are picking up where Trump left off in 2019, when he used a Kremlin lie to extort Ukraine’s president into a conspiracy to smear Biden and defraud the American people. It didn’t work, but they’re trying for a second time.
The story, as press critic Dan Froomkin deftly put it, “is no longer whether Joe Biden committed high crimes and misdemeanors by maintaining relations with his ne’er-do-well son. In fact, there has never been any credible evidence to support that conclusion.
“The real story,” Dan said, is “the ludicrous Republican impeachment investigation has now been exposed as a Russian intelligence op. This, even as Republicans do Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding by blocking support for Ukraine and only a few short years after Trump aides welcomed Russian moves to help the Trump campaign in 2016.”
We need to shift our expectations to understand that this willingness to do anything to win – even if it means aligning with foreign despots, even if it means committing treason as a consequence – goes back decades. According to historian Heather Cox Richardson, it’s the “logical outgrowth of the process begun during the administration of President Richard Nixon, when his people deliberately appealed to voters’ emotions with a picture of traditional America under siege by antiwar student activists, people of color, and feminist women.”
Professor Richardson quotes Nixon speechwriter, and eventual Republican presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan: “We are in a contest over the soul of the country now and the decision will not be some middle compromise…. It will be their kind of society or ours.”
It will be their kind of society or ours – and I don’t know why anyone is saying that the race shouldn’t be this tight. This is why it’s going to be tight. Accept it. And while you’re at it, accept that this is the country we live in. It’s not a place where opposing leaders compete on an even playing field. If that ever existed, it hasn’t existed in at least six decades. Biden is the best candidate for this moment. But victory will depend on raising enough hell to overcome the GOP’s betrayal.
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