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Joe’s Gotta’ Go.
Talk with just about any professional Democrat in Washington or with a state party or even in a local race for utility commission, and that’s the overwhelming and increasingly contemptuous verdict when it comes to President Joe Biden in the final days of a tighter-than-it-should be race for the White House. A long-known gaffe factory who has repeatedly upended the best-laid plans with a verbal outburst, Biden had largely been relegated to campaign emeritus status as his Vice President took up the nomination in July and has done her level best to stay loyal to her boss. But with Biden’s latest—he sounded like he was calling Trump supporters “garbage”—it’s increasingly clear that the instinct to humor the President is coming at a cost.
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In fact, the ghosting of Biden may have to become a stiff-arm from Harris herself in these final days if her bid to block Trump is to have even odds. It will be awkward, for Harris and her staff alike, but Biden’s feelings cannot supersede the political needs for Democrats at this fragile moment. The stakes are too high, and Biden too unpredictable and desperate to prove he is more than a placeholder in a gilded storage locker. In fact, Biden has the lowest approval rating of any president at this point in his presidency since George H.W. Bush was coasting toward defeat in 1992. His latest slip-up only further digs the hole he finds himself in.
“Garbage” was not a word many of us had on our campaign BINGO cards, but twice in the final 10 days it has emerged as a potential race-changing utterance. First, a comedian who spoke at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally included in his lewd and racist routine an observation that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.” Trump tried to pass the comments on Sunday off as something he had no knowledge of, even though his aides had vetted the routine. The political damage was done.
But then, two days later and about a half-hour before Harris was set to deliver a masterful closing argument with the White House’s south front as her backdrop, Biden was trying to buck up Latino supporters in a call from the White House residence. (Campaign events cannot take place in the West Wing, which guaranteed Biden would not be in the Oval Office while Harris spoke. Eagle-eyed watchers of Harris’ address absorbed some symbolism in the darkened Oval Office behind her: a Harris administration would be a new thing, not a continuation of the current one.) As Biden spoke up his Vice President and talked down his predecessor, he touched on the uproar over Trump’s comic. What was meant as a comment denouncing the comic’s rhetoric toward Puerto Rico instead turned into a flub that seemed to know no limits. Biden sounded as if he was calling Trump’s supporters “garbage,” although a crisis-mode White House distributed a transcript that suggested that the President was calling the rhetoric garbage, not the supporters who cheered it.
To wit, this is how the White House transcribed the comment: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s—his—his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.” Trump allies, summoning every bit of performative outrage, claim that the White House clean-up is meant to mask that what Biden actually said was “his supporters”—no apostrophe. It’s impossible to say what Biden exactly meant in the moment although given his half-century of public life, it was probably more a stutter and stammer than slander.
Even so, that’s not a place where Harris wanted to be. A day after an uplifting and unifying speech just off the White House grounds and before an epic crowd, Harris risked her pledge to work for all Americans and be the antithesis of Trump seeming hollow. And her campaign team knew it. On Wednesday, she told reporters traveling with her from Andrews Air Force Base that Biden had “clarified” his comment, but distanced herself from her boss more strongly than ever before: “Let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”
It did little to quiet the chaos, with Trump donning a sanitary worker’s vest and riding in a garbage truck at a campaign stop in Wisconsin later that day. In a way, Biden’s attempt to help actually muted the real “garbage” remark and injected a late-breaking messaging misstep that should have never come up.
Democrats have long tolerated Biden’s total lack of verbal discipline. As a Senator, he was a guaranteed gaffe-a-day on the Hill, often contradicting party Leadership, preempting his colleagues’ long-laid plans, and sabotaging his fellow Democrats in the White House. His first bid for the White House ended in a plagiarism scandal, his second began with comments that came off as disparaging Barack Obama, who would later pick Biden as his steady-handed global ambassador. As Vice President, Biden was a string of unforced errors, most notably at a bill signing for the law now known as Obamacare where he was caught on a hot-mic deploying vulgar language.
Biden’s allies have tried with varying degrees of success to make such unscripted moments part of the Biden brand, an authenticity that is often lacking. The spin made him into a laughable Uncle Joe, a cartoon who likes aviator sunglasses and ice cream. But the front lasted only so long, and a disastrous debate against Trump in June set in motion weeks of recrimination about 81-year-old Biden’s ability to win, let alone serve another four years. Eventually, Biden recognized the realities, endorsed Harris as his heir, and nursed his wounded ego. Biden’s loose tongue eventually proved his undoing.
But Biden still has the top job in geopolitics, and nominally still is the head of the Democratic Party. He delivered the biggest investment in green tech in U.S. history, helped dig the global economy out of a recession, and passed the infrastructure bill Trump never could. The problem is this: no one has the heart to tell him his presidency is coasting in lame-duck status with every passing week, especially with an absentee Congress looking at its own re-election bids. By the time the Democrats assembled in Chicago to officially nominate Harris, Biden’s presence was the awkward relative who had to be invited to the wedding but no one wanted to sit next to. His 52-minute speech seemed never-ending as delegates shifted between respectful and restless. “It was sad to watch him. He didn’t realize how everyone else had already turned the page,” says a former Biden aide who was there. “No one had the courage or the heart to tell him that the crowd was not there for him.”
In recent weeks, Biden has been itching to get out on the road, his orbit says. He still thinks he alone has the decoder for white, working-class voters who have been tepid on Democrats and even more lukewarm on Harris, who would make history as the first woman and second person of color elected to the presidency. Biden keeps asking his staffers to check with the Harris campaign—which took over Biden’s own offices in Wilmington as a matter of efficient take-over—about where he could be helpful.
And with respectful consistency, Wilmington has been telling the White House a steady message: We’ll let you know. It’s an especially awkward brush-off, especially since so many members of the Harris high command were initially hired as Biden’s operatives. Middle-Class Joe is going to have to stay Second-String Joe in this final inning, no matter how steamed both camps are at the moment.
Biden’s braintrust insists they get it, even if their longtime boss is slower to see it. They see a friend a few steps off his best game, and at its peak was never flawless. His “garbage” gaffe was only the latest such blunder. During a visit to New Hampshire last week, saying of Trump, “We got to lock him up,” before quickly adding, “Politically lock him up. Lock him out.” It was catnip for conservatives who believe Trump’s claims that Biden weaponized the justice system against him.
Then, on Friday, Biden seemed to suggest former Rep. Gabby Giffords was dead. She is not, having survived an assassination attempt and still running the vanguard anti-gun violence group in the country that bears her name.
If any of these missteps were stand-alone events, it would be reasonable to chalk them up as a tired man showing his age. But it’s been like this for a long while, even if Biden hasn’t accepted it. Biden thinks the elites and the press are hyper-focused on his gaffes, and let those made by Trump and others slide. To the ever-thin-skinned Biden, he’s getting bullied again despite his good intentions.
So, heading into the final weekend before Election Day, a sidelined and chastened President is going to have to ride the bench and let Harris land the massive machine she inherited from him. For his part, Biden plans a trip Friday to visit with union members in Philadelphia, something of a second homebase for the Bidens across the river from Delaware. That event, however, is tellingly an official White House function, not a Harris campaign rally. Biden just doesn’t seem to understand a maxim of all performative endeavors, including politics: the greatest know when to cede the stage.
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