Joe Biden’s 2024 Bid Is Meant to Save Democrats from Themselves

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, December 06, 2022

 

From the 1994 Tom Clancy movie, Clear and Present Danger:

 

John Clark: What you’re looking for is a political mess.

 

Robert Ritter: Yes or no?

 

John Clark: Is that what they want? Because that’s what this is.

 

Robert Ritter: They want what every first-term administration wants: a second term.

 

It’s not quite true that Joe Biden absolutely must run for reelection. But if he didn’t, he would set off a lot of metaphorical bombs for his political party and allies. Thus we shouldn’t be surprised that Ron Klain is telling people to expect Biden to announce he’ll run for another term after the holidays.

 

Biden’s health: For the past three years, everyone around Biden has sworn up and down that he’s the pinnacle of health for a man his age. Many of us strongly suspect that is an exaggeration at best and an outright lie at worst. A declaration that Biden is choosing to not run for another term would be a signal that all the skeptics were right, that the job of the presidency is beyond the capacity of most men in their late 70s and into their 80s. It will also confirm that figures like White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre were lying to us when she claimed that Biden has so much energy she “can’t even keep up with him.”

 

Signaling a fear of defeat: One of the ironies of the midterm elections going fairly well for Democrats is that their victories obscure the fact that Biden is still in rough shape for a first-term president. His approval rating is still around 41 percent. The right-track/wrong-direction numbers still look terrible. Americans are still down about the state of the economy and are pessimistic about the future. Maybe if Biden ends up running against a particularly unpopular Republican rival — say, one that angrily called for terminating the U.S. Constitution on social media or something like that — Biden could win in November 2024. But against a much younger GOP candidate with any appeal to independents — say, a governor who won a swing state by 20 points or something like that — Biden would likely be in real trouble.

 

You could argue that much of Biden’s recent political success stems from facing the right rivals. In the 2020 Democratic primary, his top rival was an equally elderly avowed socialist who was so stubborn he tried to tell South Floridians what a great guy Fidel Castro was. In the 2020 general election, his rival was arguably the most controversy-prone and self-destructive president in U.S. history. In the 2020 midterms, with the aforementioned low job-approval ratings and high inflation, Biden was saved by Republicans nominating a bunch of unelectable weirdos in key states. Sooner or later, Biden’s luck will run out in this area.

 

Averting a Democratic civil war: When a president announces he isn’t running for another term, the normal development would be for his party to unite around the current vice president. But Democrats can read a poll and see that Kamala Harris is even less popular than Biden. And if it isn’t Harris, then the opportunity would be there for a bunch of Democrats with presidential ambitions: Pete Buttigieg, J. D. Pritzker, Gavin Newsom. Some African-American and women Democrats would likely resent the white male contenders attempting to dislodge Harris, making the post-primary unification of the party more difficult.

 

One-termers: Fairly or not, the history books are not kind to one-term presidents. Choosing to not run for another term would be interpreted, fairly or not, as an admission that Biden didn’t think he could handle the job for another four years. As much as Biden would claim that he was riding off into the sunset on his own terms, some would see the decision as quitting in the face of mounting adversity.