Biden’s fight for political survival starts now – Washington Examiner

The most important 72 hours of President Joe Biden’s political career kicked off roughly 10 minutes into the first presidential debate.

By the time the CNN showdown with former President Donald Trump was over, long simmering Democratic doubts boiled over. Democrats looked on in horror as the incumbent was pummeled at times by the presumptive Republican nominee but mostly self-immolated on stage.

The liberal media intelligentsia that has formed a protective cocoon around Biden for four years gradually peeled away with each stammer and derailed train of thought. Now he will have to outlast calls for his withdrawal from the race or replacement at the Democratic National Convention.

“[R]ight now as we speak there is a deep, a wide, and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party,” CNN’s John King said afterward. “It started minutes into the debate and it continues right now. It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers. And they are having conversations about the president’s performance, which they think was dismal, which they think will hurt other people down the party [on] the ticket, and they are having conversations about what they should do about it.”

FOR BIDEN, THE DEBATE STAKES COULDN’T BE HIGHER

Van Jones said Biden “had a test to meet tonight to restore confidence of the country and of the base. And he failed to do that.”

“And I think there’s a lot of people who are going to want to see him consider taking a different course now,” Jones continued. “We’re still far from our convention. And there is time for this party to figure out a different way forward, if he will allow us to do that.”

“If, for whatever reason, there is a change at the top of the ticket, you guys are in trouble with Donald Trump,” David Axlerod warned CNN’s Republican panelists. But this was also a concession by a top adviser to former President Barack Obama that Biden may need to be replaced to bring about a competitive race.

“Time for an open convention,” a Democratic operative told Politico.

Axios reported “​​Biden’s fitness to serve another four years” was “now being openly questioned even by some allies.”

“Telling people they didn’t see what they saw is not the way to respond to this,” former Obama foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes wrote on social media, after weeks of White House assurances that videos Biden looking exactly the way he looked on Thursday night were “cheap fakes.”

The rare defenses of Biden were unconvincing. “It was a slow start, that’s obvious to everyone. I’m not going to debate that point,” Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledged. “I’m talking about the choice in November. I’m talking about one of the most important elections in our collective lifetime. And do we want to look at what November will bring and go on a course for America that is about a destruction of democracy?”

Democrats already had doubts about Biden heading into the debate. He is trailing Trump nationally, at risk of being only the second Democratic presidential nominee to lose the popular vote since 1988. Biden is behind in most or all of the battleground states that will decide the election. There are doubts about his age and basic campaign strategy, which includes focusing on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot at a time of widespread pessimism about the economy. The Democrats’ battleground state Senate candidates are mostly hanging on, including in places where Trump is leading, suggesting Biden is the problem.

The debate put all those doubts on steroids. Now the only question is whether Democrats mount a public or private pressure campaign on Biden to bow out — and if so, whether Biden can weather it.

One possibility is that leading Democrats copy Barry Goldwater’s trip with Republicans to the White House during Watergate to tell Richard Nixon it was over. Obama, former White House chief of staff Ron Klain, or the Clintons could tell Biden that his legacy is currently getting Trump out of office and ask the president if he would like to instead be known for letting Trump back in.

“Some of those conversations include ‘Should we go to the White House and ask the president to step aside?’” CNN’s King reported. “Other conversations are about ‘Should prominent Democrats go public with that call?’ because they feel this debate was so terrible.”

But it is not obvious there is much Democrats can do if Biden doesn’t heed their advice. He has been running for president off and on since 1987. He won all the Democratic primaries and nearly all the pledged convention delegates.

“This isn’t the ‘60s, okay,” Axelrod said. “Voters choose the nominee. He is the nominee, only he can decide whether he’s going to continue… this is a guy with a lot of pride who believes in himself. The idea that he’s going to say, ‘You know, I had a bad debate, I think I’m going to walk away from this.’ I find it hard to believe.”

“I think it’s unhelpful,” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), one of the prime replacement candidates, told MSNBC about his party’s freakout. “And I think it’s unnecessary. We’ve got to go in and we’ve got to keep our heads high. And as I say, we’ve got to have the back of this president. You don’t turn your back because of one performance. What kind of party does that?”

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If the polls do not move, it is possible that this Democratic firestorm will blow over. Perhaps they avoid the second debate and the campaign trail. Or maybe they don’t keep him in isolation for days before the September debate and he bounces back like Ronald Reagan did in 1984. Biden could borrow a page from Trump’s playbook and wait for the negative headlines to die down.

But Democrats who believe Biden’s rhetoric that democracy is on the ballot this November are terrified. The president is running out of chances to assuage their fears. They, not Trump, are the biggest threat to his political future.