There’s an old Yiddish folk tale that goes something like this: A peasant complains to the village rabbi that his one-room hut is chaotically overcrowded with wife and kids. He pleads for a better life. But the rabbi asks him to imagine how he’d feel if his chickens and goats and roosters and geese lived in the hut as well, with all their honking and clucking and quarreling. The rabbi’s lesson: “It could always be worse.”
That’s good advice for the grassroots Democrats who are fretting about Joe Biden’s re-election announcement. They believe he has done a good job – 78 percent of Dems and Dem-leaning independents said so in a recent national poll, with darn good reason considering the string of policy achievements he has wrested from thin congressional majorities – but they’re not jazzed about re-hiring an octogenarian with shaky elocution and a physical gait that gets seemingly stiffer by the day.
But the Rolling Stones sang it well, echoing the rabbi: You can’t always get what you want / But if you try sometime you find / You get what you need.
Yeah, most Democrats say that, in the best of all possible worlds, they’d thank Biden for his service and wave him goodbye. But if the ’24 race pits Biden against a Republican MAGAt, they say they’ll support the president anyway – overwhelmingly so. According to the latest NBC News poll, 96 percent of party progressives (those who preferred Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren last time) will vote for Joe in ’24. And Sanders said yesterday that his days on the stump are over, that he’s on the Joe team now.
Those sentiments should not come as a surprise. On paper, most incumbents look vulnerable a year prior to running for re-election (Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush) but most of them win in the end. In fact, roughly six in 10 Americans told pollsters in 1982 that Reagan shouldn’t run again in 1984. The relatively few incumbents who’ve lost their second bids were seriously hampered by massive policy or personal failures – Herbert Hoover (Great Depression), Jimmy Carter (stagflation, hostage crisis), George H. W. Bush (long recession), and Donald Trump (being Trump). Biden doesn’t have that kind of baggage, despite MAGA Republican attempts to paint him as Hoover II.
Which brings us, indeed, to the MAGA Republicans.
The early ’24 polls show that Biden is trailing “a generic Republican.” In real life, there is no such species. Biden will be running against an actual person, and that person, by all accounts, is more likely than ever to be a criminal defendant who totes enough baggage to sink the Titanic. Is there a shred of evidence that Trump has built beyond his base since his decisive 2020 defeat? Are the swing voters who doomed him last time in pivotal Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia likely to find him more appealing next time – when it’s more than probable that he’ll be criminally charged by then for his serial assaults on democracy?
Here’s an answer, courtesy of a new national poll. The MAGA base is all in for Trump; 63 percent of Republicans say they want a second Trump term even if he’s found guilty of a crime. But only 21 percent of independents and 17 percent of college-educated whites say they’re willing to vote for a criminal.
Granted, there’s a paucity of public appetite for a Biden-Trump rematch, which many voters will likely dismiss as a choice between “the lesser of two evils.” But guess what: That cliche has been around forever because most elections are dissed that way. We tend to think of Kennedy versus Nixon in 1960 as the apogee of fabulousness, but back in 1960 journalists like CBS News icon Eric Sevareid groused that the two candidates were less and lesser – and one prominent Democrat complained that the electorate was “stuck with taking the lesser or the most of two evils or none at all,” that one guy (JFK) was “immature” and the other guy (Nixon) was “impossible.” The complainant was former president Harry Truman.
So let’s keep it real, folks. The looming choice this time is between an aging but stalwart defender of democracy who has repeatedly scored on policy and a somewhat less aged saboteur of democracy whose policy agenda is revenge. Conservatives with half a brain realize the trap Republicans seem determined to walk into. Commentator Jonah Goldberg tweets: “The best case for Biden running again is the ‘extremist’ he’d run against…and how idiotic it’d be (for the GOP) to nominate precisely the kind of Republican Dems need to run against.”
Indeed, the MAGAts in Washington and the red state legislatures are gifting Biden plenty of ammo. The first word he spoke, in yesterday’s video announcement, was freedom. Biden and other top Democrats (notably Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, in his recent inaugural remarks) intend to brand the word as their own. Republicans used to own the word, as in: freedom from Russian tyranny and freedom from government overreach. But now that they’re groupies for Russian tyranny and practitioners of government overreach (targeting women, drag queens, and transgender people; banning books and whitewashing historical racism), Biden can take the high ground, as he did in his re-election video, and defend the freedom to control one’s body, the freedom to live equally with others, the freedom to read freely.
And just imagine what would’ve happened if Biden had decided to step down. Chaos would’ve ensued. Kamala Harris would’ve been the designated front-runner, by dint of her veep status, but she would not have cleared the field – quite the contrary, given the sizable share of Dems who find her underwhelming. And if she were knocked off her perch by any or many of the white governors aspiring to ascend, the identity politicking would’ve been fierce. Karen Finney, a Black party strategist, recently said: “Black voters would read (Harris being rejected) as ’Well, you don’t value what we bring to the table.’ As Black women, we bring our community out to vote. Are you really going to tell Black voters you’re not interested?”
Biden may walk like an old guy, but his political instincts haven’t withered. He knows full well that, fairly or not, Harris isn’t well positioned to pull off a smooth succession. That may have influenced his decision to stay in the game. That, plus the existential MAGA danger. That, plus his ego. Care to guess when was the last time a full-term president chose to step down without being shoved toward the door? We’re talking 1928. We’re talking Calvin Coolidge.
So Democrats and Dem-leaning independents should rest easy and drink from the half-empty glass. It’s far preferable to dying of thirst in a second MAGA dystopia.