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One of the enduring themes of President Joseph Biden’s public life has been intense ambivalence about the elite institutions of American life and the well-credentialed, well-spoken, well-paid careerists who occupy them.
There is resentment, from the so-so student with a stutter who grew up in Scranton and small-town Delaware and didn’t have the economic and educational advantages of many of the people he soon would encounter in national politics.
There is hunger, for the acclaim of these same people. During internal deliberations, advisers say, Biden seems acutely attuned to the views of aides and policy experts with Ivy League degrees and commentators from historically prestigious news organizations.
There is also a well-earned sense of defiance. If those others are so swift and he’s so slow, how come he’s the guy who made it to the Senate at age 30, and is president a half-century later?
Biden’s long-time mixed feelings about establishment worthies — and, in turn, their long-time mixed feelings about him — are indispensable context for the explosion of unsolicited advice the president is receiving about what to do in the wake of his flaccid performance in Thursday’s nationally televised debate against former president Donald Trump.
The New York Times editorial page Friday said he should drop out for the good of the country. The Washington Post editorial page said he should at least cancel his weekend plans to think about it. Multiple prominent commentators — including, one notes, a preponderance of white males over 60 — said it gave them no pleasure to say so but they had ruefully concluded that it is time for Joe to Go. These voices included Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, Tom Friedman, Nicholas Kristof, Jonathan Alter, David Ignatius and former congressman Joe Scarborough, the host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” All said the chance of a diminished Biden losing to Trump is too high to risk.
A fair question: Who cares what these guys think? But there is an undeniable answer: Biden does.
That doesn’t mean he’ll take their advice. To the contrary, it may well be that the harder Biden is pushed — especially in the oracular and imperious voice of the Times ed board — the more determined he will be to defy skeptics, as part of his lifelong competition with elites.
But there is scant prospect that these voices are not capturing his attention, and likely even hurting his feelings. As colleagues have written, Biden is a regular viewer of “Morning Joe” and often cites what he has heard. (In this case, he will be more likely to cite Scarborough’s spouse, Mike Brzezinski, who said she still wants Biden as nominee.) Friedman, a Pulitzer-winning foreign affairs columnist for the Times, said he considers the president “a friend of mine” since they were together on an official trip after 9/11. He said he watched Biden’s faint, halting debate performance on CNN alone in a Lisbon hotel and it “made me weep.”
Ignatius, a Washington Post foreign policy commentator, said the debate merely ratified what became “obvious nearly a year ago that President Biden shouldn’t run for a second term.” He did so anyway, Ignatius posited, out of “a combination of moral conviction, personal confidence, and selfishness.”
The vociferousness and overlapping arguments from pundits and editorial pages were striking. But they also underlined another reality: Just as Biden’s age and affect can make him seem like a visitor from another generation, the notion of prominent commentators having wide sway over the national agenda is itself an artifact of an earlier era.
The voices appealing to Biden to drop out and call for an open Democratic convention in Chicago in August to select a more imposing nominee uniformly said they were motivated by disdain for Trump and fear of what he might do if he returns to power.
Trump and his political movement, however, are themselves an expression of how little well-credentialed establishment voices matter in the modern age. He got the Republican nomination in 2016 by trouncing the GOP’s historic kingmakers in the business class. If editorial pages mattered greatly in shaping public opinion, Trump would have been long ago shooed off the national stage.
For that matter, Biden in the 2020 Democratic nominating contest would have been the first choice of few of those people now advising him to confront the obvious about his advancing age and retreating political skills. Just as Trump rallied a movement who thrill to his rhetorical outrages and norm-shattering behavior, Biden rallied a “guess-he’ll-do” movement of people who calculated that at least he could beat Trump. What’s uncertain is whether the editorial pages and other voices will be the start of “he-just-won’t-do” movement.
At the height of the Vietnam War, in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson by legend watched a devastating commentary on the war from Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News and concluded, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”
Fifty-six years later, if Joe Biden has lost Joe Scarborough, it’s probably true that lost influential people in prestigious precincts of Washington, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Those people matter a lot to Biden. They will matter a lot more, however, if they spur people who have actually faced voters — senior Democrats on Capitol Hill, or governors — to take action. So far, there are lots of elected officials who nod in agreement with commentators — and even whisper privately in their ears — but who don’t say anything like that in public.
