After months of obsessing over the presidential contest, it was jarring last week to tune in to the annual Veterans Day commemoration at Arlington National Cemetery and see President Biden center stage. The all-but-forgotten president is too literally a lame duck; his stride has given way to a shuffle. He looks lost. He tried to project force in his tribute, but you braced for the verbal trips.
Why did Biden think he could serve another four years?
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
He’s so diminished from the politician I’ve covered for 40 years, from the Senate through the vice presidency to the White House. I initially respected his judgment not to retire, as Democrats did. In late 2022, Biden turned 80, but he celebrated unusually good midterm election results for his party and one of the most successful first two years of any president (the Afghanistan withdrawal aside). He’d won landmark legislation, such as the infrastructure law, that will have benefits for years.
And for the next four, Donald Trump will be stealing the bragging rights.
Midterm is when Biden should have announced that he wouldn’t run again, that he’d be the “bridge” to new leaders as he’d said in 2020. That he selfishly didn’t give way until far too late in 2024 helped doom Democrats’ chance of keeping the White House, and thus dealt a blow to his own legacy. History will be kinder to him than Democrats currently are, let alone the voters, but that’s little consolation now.
Now, however, it’s time for his party to look forward. More than a week after the voters’ verdict, Democrats should stop the finger-pointing. They can look backward long enough to identify, and learn from, the mistakes that enabled the election of a past president who still denies his 2020 defeat, connived to overturn it, incited an insurrection and snubbed the peaceful transfer of power — all detestable firsts.
What comes next is confronting Trump, whose early decisions — Fox News host Pete Hegseth for Defense secretary! Matt Gaetz for attorney general! Elon Musk as de facto vice president! — suggest the radicalism and overreach that lie ahead.
Also, their recriminations obscure the fact that Kamala Harris ran a close race, almost certainly closer than Biden would have.
When all votes are finally counted, Trump’s margin of victory will be two percentage points or less — the smallest since 1968. Democrats didn’t expect to keep their slim Senate majority even if Harris prevailed, and their candidates won in several states that she lost, limiting Republicans’ new majority. Republicans have kept the House majority, but barely — and we’ve seen how hobbled they’ve been by their fractiousness when they have no votes to spare.
For all Democrats’ self-flagellation about seeming arrogantly out of touch with Americans, especially on the transgender rights issue that Trump so effectively used against Harris, voters in many cases took their side on ballot measures for abortion rights, a higher minimum wage and mandated paid leave, even in red states. Trump vows mass deportations, but exit polls showed a majority of voters say undocumented immigrants should be able to apply for legal status, as Democrats favor.
The issue of immigration was among the three “I’s” that damned Democrats overall, along with inflation and Biden’s incumbency. Harris, overly deferential to the man who elevated her, not only didn’t do enough to separate herself from the unpopular president, she gave Trump’s ad makers a gift when she told a friendly inquisitor on “The View” that “not a thing comes to mind” that she’d have done differently from Biden. That was a rare mistake for Harris in a challenging late-starting campaign, but a big one.
The only thing worse than Democrats’ backbiting would be denialism. Democrats aren’t in denial. They recognize that Trump’s gains over his past showings were staggering for their breadth. He did better in most counties, including in Democrats’ urban bastions and even the Bronx and Queens district represented by the left’s icon Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “The working class is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling,” Bronx Rep. Richie Torres tweeted, including “absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’ or ‘From the River to the Sea’ or ‘Latinx.’ ” Never mind that neither Biden nor most Democrats used those terms; they didn’t push back much either.
Trump’s wresting of the working class from Democrats is near-complete. The only question is whether its backing is unique to him or will transfer to post-Trump Republicans.
As annoying as Democrats’ squabbling is, it’s the sign of a healthy party to look inward after losses. That the Republican Party didn’t do so after its defeats in 2018, 2020 and 2022 — and echoed Trump’s antidemocratic denials in 2020 — is a symptom of its ill health under his sway, despite this year’s victories. Democrats correctly lament that their far left has had too much influence, if not real power, but the far right doesn’t just influence the Republican Party, it runs it. That will be a problem going forward.
For now, however, the problems at hand are Democrats’. What helped make their erosion in cities and suburbs so catastrophic is that they long ago abandoned rural America. It’s time to rebuild in both places, or at least try.
The party has a deep bench for the reconstruction ahead. One of its talents, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, offered constructive advice in a New York Times op-ed on Tuesday — he had me at “I refuse to play the blame game” — though his Rx mostly described what Democrats are already doing, or attempting, such as expanding affordable healthcare. Still, it’s a start.
Meanwhile, one of the party’s big problems soon will take care of itself: In two months, Biden finally cedes the stage.