Did Joe Biden Doom the Democratic party? Part 2

Or: Why Run for Re-election at 81?

In 2020, Joe Biden asked America to view him as a caretaker. Someone who would tamp down the excesses of Donald Trump’s presidency and serve as a bridge to the next generation. (Mark Whipple, Uncharted; p. 53; Fight, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, p. 284). For example, Politico reported that it would be inconceivable for Biden to serve a second term. After all, he would be the first octogenarian president. In March of 2020, when he was on a stage with Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, California senator Kamala Harris, and New Jersey senator Cory Booker, Biden declared, “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.”

But as 2024 approached, there was no sign that Biden was going to announce stepping down, therefore allowing people like Whitmer to run for the White House. And the Democratic National Committee made it worse by declaring there would be no debates, which was an implicit endorsement. (And maybe they knew something else about Biden?) For some inexplicable reason, the only early candidates who declared were Marianne Williamson and Robert Kennedy Jr. Neither of them had ever held office before. The DNC did not take Williamson seriously, and they set up a “Get Bobby” operation to systematically take Kennedy down.

When the DNC declared there would be no debates, and that South Carolina--rather than Iowa or New Hampshire--would be the first primary, Kennedy decided the game was rigged and chose to run as an independent. (AP, story by Ali Swenson, 10/9/23) New Hampshire and Iowa were two states where Kennedy was running well. And, in fact, two early stories showed how he could win those primaries. (See The Hill, 6/21/23; NY Post, 6/15/23) For Biden and the DNC this brought back some bad memories.

Because in 2020, Senator Bernie Sanders had won in Iowa with Biden finishing fourth, with less than 14% of the vote. In New Hampshire, Biden did even worse. Again, Sanders won. Biden came in fifth, with less than 10% of the vote. The Democratic establishment decided that Sanders was threatening to win the nomination, and they did not like that. So they acted much like they did in 2016, when it looked like Sanders could beat Hillary Clinton. A few days before the South Carolina primary--and after making a deal with Biden that he would nominate an African American woman to the Supreme Court—representative James Cliburn gave a full throated endorsement to Biden’s lagging candidacy. (NBC News, 1/25/21) There was and is no more powerful politician in that state than Cliburn. Biden won resoundingly.

Then something odd happened. Before Super Tuesday, people like Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar and multi-millionaire Tom Steyer suddenly dropped out of the race. This clearly favored Biden. Since those three candidates represented the more moderate wing, while Sanders was to the left. In essence, what this did was to clear the field for Joe Biden.

With little question, Bobby Kennedy saw the DNC’s South Carolina move up as representing the same pattern as in 2020. Except now it would be even more blatant. So RFK Jr. decided to run as an independent. But again, the DNC was not having any of that. They began to file lawsuits against his attempt to get on state ballots. As Kennedy’s Vice-Presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan said in a revealing interview with podcaster Tom Bilyeu, the DNC had so marginalized their campaign and forced them to spend so much money in court costs that now they had no choice but to play spoiler or start a new political party. (Politico, story by Brittany Gibson, 8/20/24) At that time, in August of last year, she suggested that Bobby could become chief of Health and Human Services under Trump.

This leaves an interesting question: Did RFK Jr. arrange a deal with Trump along the lines that, if Trump would declassify the records on the JFK, MLK and RFK cases, he would join him on stage and be his HHS chief? There is some ballast to this concept. Namely that, according to attorney Andrew Iler, Joe Biden was even worse on the JFK records than Donald Trump was. (See article at Kennedysandking.com of July 21, 2023 “The Biden Attempt to usurp Congress’ Authority over JFK Records.”). And on the third day of his presidency, Trump signed an executive order doing just that. And it appears that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—another disaffected Democrat—overrode resistance at FBI and CIA to get the job done.

One main reason that Gabbard left was that she felt the Democratic Party had become the faction for constant war. That is, the old Gore Vidal adage: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. And there is plentiful evidence for this. As I wrote in my previous substack entitled ”Biden in Review: Foreign Policy part 2”, I can find no indication that Vice-President Biden objected to the US bombing of Libya through NATO, which ended up in disaster. In fact, Jake Sullivan, who worked on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign—and it was she who pushed this on then President Obama--became Biden’s National Security Advisor. Under Biden Victoria Nuland, who ran American policy in Ukraine, became number two at the State Department. Anthony Blinken, who became Biden’s Secretary of State, advocated for another disaster, namely the invasion of Iraq. (Responsible Statecraft, article by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, 9/4/23) One would think that a colossal error in judgment like Iraq would automatically eliminate Blinken from any consideration in a Democratic administration. And, of course, these predilections have allowed US sponsorship of the wars in Ukraine and Israel’s almost daily pummeling of Gaza.

I could go on and on, but let me just add that anyone who declared the victory of Islamic Fundamentalism in Syria as a plus sign, that administration is just about bankrupt. Because anyone can see the mass slaughters this has caused, and it could have and should have been predicted. Because the leader of that Islamic faction was sent to Syria many years ago by Al Qaeda. In fact, there have been reports that 1300 Syrians were killed in 72 hours and entire families have been wiped out. (NPR Report of 3/9/2025, by Juliana Kim; CNN report of 3/12/25 by Kareem El Damanhoury)

This was not the tradition of John Kennedy. And this is why it is so unsettling that Biden had a portrait of John Kennedy in his study. And there is a picture of Gabbard with Jim Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable poking out of her purse. Too bad she did not give it to Biden. Because as the reader can see, its not so much that Gabbard and Bobby Kennedy Jr. left the Democratic Party. One can logically say that, once they were marginalized, they were left with no choice. And there was really no point in running against Biden since the DNC had more or less preordained that coronation.

Bill Daley, who served as Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, could not comprehend the situation. Especially because Biden’s approval ratings were well below average. As he commented:

The public hasn’t been with him since the very brief period from the inauguration to the Afghanistan withdrawal. At that point his approval rating was over fifty. But then it collapsed and never went up again. And the internal polling only got worse. (Whipple, p. 61; all references to e book version)

As Daley continued, no one in the party wanted to talk about the elephant in the room: Biden’s age. He said:

Everyone ignored it. And every politician, every big shot, they all bought into the attitude that if you run against him and he gets softened up and loses to Trump, you’ll be blamed and your career is over. Every freaking one of them had no balls. (ibid)

But here was the problem. Vice President Kamala Harris’s approval rating was slightly worse than Biden’s. It was at 36 %.(Whipple, p. 54) So just what was the DNC supporting here? It amounted to a ticket that had both candidates in the approval range that was below 40 per cent.

The only elected Democratic politician who eventually decided to run was the little known Dean Phillips, a representative from Minnesota. He called for generational change and pointed to Biden’s age. (USA Today, 1/7/22, story by Joey Garrison) He even tried to talk to better known candidates like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and J B Pritzker of Illinois. They would not even speak with him directly. (Business Insider, 10/31/23, story by Madison Hall.).

In my opinion, that team –Whitmer and Pritzker--would have beaten Trump and Vance. But here one has a political party where even any discussion of such is apparently verboten. They would rather go down with a weakened incumbent than win by upsetting the status quo ante. This is how forlorn the Democratic Party has become. Its like the last scene of Modern Times, with Chaplin and Paulette Godard escaping arrest and walking down a lonely road to nowhere. Except Biden and Harris had nowhere near the charm or humor that Chaplin/Goddard had.

And there are indications that Biden’s inner circle was aware that winning this time around was going to be quite difficult--and they knew it even before the disastrous June debate. In 2020, Biden won three key swing states—Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia—by merely 44,000 votes. In other words, there was no wiggle room this time around. But in 2024, Biden was behind the challenger in enough of the seven major battleground states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina and Nevada—that it was difficult to see how he could find a path to victory. (Allen and Parnes, p. 18)

But as we know today, Biden’s inner circle understood this. And the campaign leaders decided to keep the polling data and analytics scores closely held. For example, the Biden team in Pennsylvania—a very important state, perhaps the key state in the election—was not given a national breakdown from April to June. As one close advisor said, “The numbers were not good.” (ibid) Because of this secrecy and because of the public polls it became clear to many top Democrats that Biden was not going to win. And again, this was before the debacle of the June debate. In fact, if one can comprehend it, many Democrats thought the debate would redirect the race in their favor!

Talk about lost sheep. But prior to the debate there was never any consideration in the Biden camp about abiding by the caretaker declaration made on stage. As one Biden operative said, “Nobody walks away from this. No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter.” (Allen and Parnes, p. 20) And that attitude was also manifested by Jill Biden. Eight years as Second Lady and four years as First Lady had clearly grown on her. Same with advisors like Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon. As one Washington insider said:

Ricchetti was one hundred percent in. Donilon was one hundred percent in. All of the people around him. They’re my friends but for a lot of them, this was job security and this was as good a job as they’re ever going to get. And let’s be honest, Jill was a thousand percent behind this. So she was pushing it. The staff was all pushing it. At the end of the day, I don’t think anyone in that inner circle was presenting the president any contrary advice: that this thing is not going to be easy or maybe this is not the best thing for the Democratic Party. (Allen and Parnes, p. 20)

That is stunning in itself. But what makes it worse is that, in now revealed private polling, they knew it was going to be uphill. In the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, plus Arizona, only 11 % thought the economy was getting better. Biden’s rating on inflation was 26 %. The capper is that his overall rating was at 41 %. (Allen and Parnes, p. 21) Do I need to add that Kamala Harris lost each of those states? And that Trump did something in his race against her that he could not do against Hillary Clinton and Biden? He won the popular vote.

In light of the above, Biden did not leave Harris with a winning hand. Not even close. So when we hear Biden saying today that he could have beaten Trump, what on earth is he talking about? (BBC report of 1/8/25 by Holly Honderich)

Well, he might be trying to rationalize his disastrous choice to run again in the first place.

(In Part 3, we will examine the controversy of whether or not Biden’s camp, and others, knew he had advance symptoms of old age dementia, and also his struggle to stay in the race even after the debate disaster.)