Withdraw

As I was halfway through writing this essay, the Supreme Court decision came down granting Donald Trump immunity from prosecution for virtually anything he did while holding public office.  Any conversation he held or, should he be re-elected, may hold with any member of his staff or cabinet, or with any military officer, seems to be shielded.  The implications have me reeling.  They make what follows even more crucial.

For, the implications of Thursday's presidential debate were bad enough.  

It took me only a few excruciating minutes to conclude: President Joe Biden must pull out of the 2024 presidential contest.  The stakes go well beyond the question of electability.  Biden's withdrawal is a national security imperative, an imperative in the global brawl over the very life of democracy that is raging far from our shores as well as within them.  As Ross Douthat put it in Saturday's New York Times, Biden's "obvious deterioration" doesn't just make a Trump victory more likely.  It also means that a Biden victory, and a second Biden term, would themselves endanger the United States.  For the president to acknowledge and act on this reality would be one of the most courageous demonstrations of patriotism since George Washington refused to run for a third term.

As Douthat suggests, the enfeeblement that was on unmistakable display Thursday may already have emboldened avowed U.S. adversaries.  And even the closest U.S. allies, as Benjamin Netanyahu has amply demonstrated, act in ways they know violate U.S. interests and core principles.  Diplomatic chiding behind closed doors -- already weak leverage -- has even less chance of restraining them if the chider-in-chief is wobbly in his grasp of what matters.  Nor is such a spectacle good for democracy itself.  At a time of acute peril for government of and by the people, Joe Biden is no longer up to the challenge of leading the world's foremost democracy.   

Yet, ignoring these dangers, the walking dead immediately closed ranks.  Democratic Party leaders and Biden's family and closest confidants scrambled with their face-paint and verbiage to persuade us to doubt the unexpected moment of real, in-the-flesh-evidence we got.  Former Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean, for example, told National Public Radio Monday he didn't "think Biden's in any worse shape than Reagan was in his last couple of years."  (There has been reasoned debate as to whether Reagan suffered the onset of Alzheimers disease while still in office).  

Wow.  The truths that get conveyed, despite people's best efforts with the airbrush.

So what's the alternative to Biden's trademark stick-it-out reflex?  A patriotic decision to decline to run, and an open convention.  That prospect, warned party operative Dean, "would be incredibly ugly. ... There'd be several contenders.  It would be a wild convention."  

I say, bring it on.  Not one but several talented contenders?  All with a real chance of winning?  Vying publicly for six short weeks for the confidence of newly released delegates and the voters they represent?  Then an open convention to select the very best?  That sounds a lot more like democracy than the sclerotic regular procedure Americans have submitted to for decades.  And what a courageous example to set for the rest of the world. 

I understand how powerful is the pull of a strategy or coping mechanism that has proven as successful to a person as Biden's obdurate refusal to give up has proven to him over the course of his career.  These are the reliable patterns that are so hard to shake when we embark on a rite of passage.  The sign of true maturity is the ability to recognize when those loyal strategies, the ones we've always fallen back on, no longer serve.  For Biden, that time is now.

I also realize that Monday's Supreme Court sledgehammer blow to the foundational idea of our democracy -- that even the president is subject to its laws -- makes the scenario described here less likely.  Still, it's the first prospect that's given me political energy in years. 

So, if you agree, make your views known.  Carry a sign to your July 4th celebration; contact your Democratic senators, or anyone you know who knows someone with influence within Democratic Party leadership; come up with your own idea.  In any case, in fact, get creative.  Our democracy needs your imagination.