Will he or won’t he? Should he or shouldn’t he? The President Joe Biden decision on the future of his presidency could come as early as this week.
Top News Today :
After delivering a horrendous performance at last month’s first presidential debate of the election season, President Biden has been bombarded with backlash from members of his own party. The debate was supposed to reinvigorate the campaign and convince Americans that Mr. Biden is capable of beating Donald Trump and serving another 4 years. Instead, the opposite happened and, with less than 4 months to go before the election, his poll numbers and approval rating have taken a disastrous nose-dive.
“I’ve never seen a president with 36% approval get reelected,” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos said during a taped interview last Friday which didn’t do much to quell calls for Biden to quit. Others called the interview an intervention to convince the president of his reality.
Early last week, President Biden traveled to Camp David and met with his family to discuss the possibility of dropping out. However, after an 11th-hour rally from the other Biden’s, the president emerged from the meeting defiant and determined to stay in the race.
Sadly, his optimism was not shared by a growing contingent of party leaders and lawmakers.
Around the halls of Congress, Democrats privately discussed the difficulty of watching the president shuffle onstage with an “old man’s” gait, stumble over words, confuse facts, and frequently lose his train of thought. Democrats are understandably concerned that as the oldest president in US history at 81 years of age, Mr. Biden may be too old and frail to withstand the rigors of another 4 years in The White House. In fact, whispers around Washington are that staffers have been hiding the president’s rather obvious cognitive decline, that he is very likely suffering from dementia, and that it’s time to pick a new nominee to take on Donald Trump this November.
Last Wednesday, several prominent Democratic governors raced to Washington for an emergency meeting with Mr. Biden to discuss his status. On Thursday, donors began withholding money while Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia (chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who is also friends with the president) gathered support from House and Senate Democrats to urge Mr. Biden to step aside. By Friday, Democrats were already discussing potential replacements and ways to convince the defiant president that a Biden ‘decision’ was imminent one way or another.
According to Axios, Democratic Reps. Jerry Nadler of New York, Adam Smith of Washington, Mark Takano of California, and Joe Morelle of New York said during a Sunday afternoon telephone call with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries that a Biden decision is vital: either the president should choose to end his 2024 candidacy, or the party would end it for him. Additionally, Reps. Jim Himes, Susan Wild, Lloyd Doggett, Seth Moulton, Raúl Grijalva, Angie Craig, Mike Quigley, and multiple others agreed that it’s time for President Biden to do what’s best for the country and down-ballot candidates by stepping aside.
“It was pretty brutal,” a senior Democratic aide speaking on condition of anonymity said of the nearly 2-hour conference call.
Another source said the Biden decision on the future of his candidacy is not a matter of “if” but “when.” Or, in other words, the damage is done and the calls for the president to drop out will only continue to grow louder over time.
As if that wasn’t enough, several reputable news agencies have now gone on record requesting that Mr. Biden allow the party to choose some other candidate. They include The New York Times, The New York Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Economist, and The New Yorker. Additionally, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal both said bowing out should be seriously considered by the president, though neither went as far as to explicitly recommend it.
“There are certain immutable facts of life, and those were painfully obvious on that debate stage, and the president just doesn’t seem to come to — he hasn’t come to grips with it. He’s not winning this race,” former Obama senior advisor David Axelrod said on CNN’s Inside Politics. “If you just look at the data and talk to people around the country, political people around the country, it’s more likely that he’ll lose by a landslide than win narrowly this race.”
Axelrod warned, “And if the stakes are as large as he says, and I believe they are, then he really needs to consider what the right thing to do here is.”
The president is rightfully proud of his record.
— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) July 6, 2024
But he is dangerously out-of-touch with the concerns people have about his capacitiies moving forward and his standing in this race.
Four years ago at this time, he was 10 points ahead of Trump.
Today, he is six points behind.
Some say the need for the Biden decision that he step aside is as difficult as the discussion to convince an elderly grandfather that it’s time for him to stop driving. Still, it appears to be a conversation that is necessary to be had — for the Democratic Party and the well-being of all Americans.
Is the Biden presidency over? Should Mr. Biden step aside over fears of a mental decline? Or, is he still the only American capable of beating Donald Trump and taking on the nation’s woes until he’s 86 years of age in 4 more years?
OK WASSUP! discusses the Top News Today:
A Biden decision on the future of his candidacy is imminent.
Politico: Over the course of his presidency, Joe Biden’s small clutch of advisers have built an increasingly protective circle around him, limiting his exposure to the media and outside advice — an effort to manage public perceptions of the oldest person to ever hold the office and tightly control his political operation. But inside the White House, Biden’s growing limitations were becoming apparent long before his meltdown in last week’s debate, with the senior team’s management of the president growing more strictly controlled as his term has gone on. During meetings with aides who are putting together formal briefings they’ll deliver to Biden, some senior officials have at times gone to great lengths to curate the information being presented in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction. “It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration… Read more »