Democrats are being too hard on Biden
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone
The Blame Game
In Democrat's quest to make necessary corrections in leadership after their humiliating loss in 2024, there’s been some misplaced criticism of President Biden. One of the most shocking events of recent memory is Biden’s debate flop and ousting at party demand months before the election.
Reasonably, the first figure to blame in a disappointing election cycle like this one is the party leader. They don't just making the ultimate decisions, they also represent their members’ vision to the entire world. When Biden vindicated the Republican diagnosis of a demented opposition leader on the debate stage, Democrats panicked, pressuring him to step aside for Kamala Harris. Unlike many Democrats, I don’t think the loss to Trump was due to a lack of effort on Harris’ part; rather to the delay in making a critical correction in the leadership position. But Biden can’t be the only one at fault for that.
I’ve already asked for forgiveness
The disdainful attitude toward President Biden for the delay in his concession of running again is a necessary but not sufficient charge for the Blame Game. It will be debated by historians whether Biden was a good party leader, but he surely represented many Democrats in more ways than just policy aspirations.
Biden represented the disbelief many voters felt witnessing Trump’s Second Coming. The president wasn’t just juggling multiple intra-party factions, he was also making sure he had a solid record to present against Trump’s promise of a utopia. When people like Matthew Yglesias — who I align with politically — start to bash Biden to gain future electoral credence to swing voters, it makes me feel guilty. Biden was old and should have been more transparent—yes. But Yglesias, and others, act as though they weren’t in agreement with him up until the election was all but formally lost.
Some Democrats, like Nate Silver and Ezra Klein, noticed Trump’s victory at the end of the tunnel and tried to warn us. We didn’t listen. I say “we” because I was in the same boat as Biden, Yglesias, and many other Democrats. We thought Biden’s policy record would more than makeup for his lack of charisma. I even wrote about how if Democrats had taken Biden more seriously early on, we would’ve ensured he stepped aside before it was too late.
The point is: Democrats of all shades were just as complicit as Biden was until the debate. Their rush to forgive themselves while holding Biden up as tribute is messy: I think there’s a more fundamental problem.
Democrats lost before the debate
People generally see the debate as the “last straw” in Biden’s run for a second term. This is misinterpreted. To think this, one must believe that most Democrats were telling Biden to give up the mantle early and he ignored them—but that’s simply not true!
In April 2023, before Biden announced his intent on running again, nearly 8 in 10 Democrats said they approved of his job as president. Almost half said they wanted him to run again—a steadily rising number at the time. Those figures are also higher than the Republican response about Trump. If we just look at Independents, they despised both men fairly equally. Public sentiment slowly shifted against Biden through Trump’s crushing of the primary races, the failed assassination, and of course, the debate. But like I said, Democrats shouldn’t act as though there was a wave of scrutiny towards Biden from within the party before all this. Even before the debate, 65 percent of the voters surveyed said they would vote for Biden in a head-to-head matchup with Trump.
Part of the argument for choosing the debate as a catalyst comes down to the idea that voters were manipulated by the Biden Admin in shielding the deterioration of the president's cognition (as though it wasn’t aired on cable and social media all day, every day for four years straight). A possible explanation for the Admin’s lack of transparency to voters regarding Biden’s condition is that they were in the same boat as us; they knew the stakes and feared the inherent risks in making such a drastic change in leadership. They also had the same statistics: most Democrats were content with Biden. Sure, a few dissenters like Dean Phillips appeared on the scene, and was squashed in the primaries where Democrats could've made known they didn’t want the sitting president running again. We didn’t. Instead, we affirmed Biden as the person for the job.
The point here is that the election was all but formally lost by the debate. And it’s just as much our fault as it is Biden’s, or the Admin’s, or the media’s—or anyone else! No one forced us to keep Biden— as evidenced by the post-debate fiasco. We, though constrained, voluntarily chose him. By Democrats refusing to make the necessary criticisms and corrections, they set themselves up for heartbreak.
Biden’s debate performance wasn’t an indication of his arrogance; it was an indication of ours. While moderate Democrats recognize this and blame Biden in order to distance themselves from their past selves, it’s no less true that Biden could be blaming them just as much for the delay and subsequent beat down.
Help me help you
Some of the criticism of Biden stems from his behavior after being kicked from the party nomination. Reports have surfaced about his uncertainty of Harris’ chances, which wasn’t a unique thing. He was also boastful about his political and policy choices and that he’d beat Trump if he had stayed on the ticket. These are a bit harder to shrug off.
Politically, his biggest challenge was communication. While it’s a really important thing during campaigns, it has a precise function during normal Admin operations, and much of it was diluted by moral equivocating media outlets and dominant disinformation narratives from Republicans.
I’m not sure Democrats—as a whole—could’ve asked for a better policy directive than what the Biden Admin offered— not as a progressive anyways. As a moderate or swing voter, one could argue Biden went too far on some issues or ignored many of their concerns, but that must be covered by acknowledgments of party infighting and compromises. For instance, Biden needed to get the Squad and centrist Joe Minchin on board for many policies— he accomplished that a few times! He also was fighting the media from the left, middle, and right about the policy he — and Republicans — passed, while receiving most of the blame. Will Stancil has been the best voice on the media’s inept reporting during the campaign and I sympathize with many of his arguments (though I think he needs to put more blame on Biden).
If Biden thinks he would’ve beat Trump, then that would be the main place where I join Democrats in harsh criticism. One has to be delusional to think such a thing. And that may indeed be why Democrats are so harsh: as they attempt to criticize and correct, Biden is unapologetic. He ignores the reality that Harris ran a comparatively moderate campaign and likely did better with minority groups than he would have in her loss. Biden wouldn’t have won, but I don’t think he would’ve gotten crushed either. Maybe that’s what he’s saying.
It doesn’t make sense to criticize Biden for being a crappy communicator and then criticize him for communicating exactly what’s on his mind. Which is it: does he have the ability to explain his thoughts effectively or not?
Theory of Agency
Derek Thompson explained one day on X how a big problem with politics, and especially foreign affairs, is that people attribute their unfavored side to all or most of the agency and their preferred side with basically none. I call it a theory of agency (Thompson has not acknowledged this).
Democrats have been developing a strategy of “combative centrism” and a “common sense” approach to policy, but the fact that they’re only just now discovering this scheme shows it wasn’t the worldview before now. Holding Biden to this new, improved standard is unfair. We’re criticizing him for things we ourselves thought at the time, and now we’re piling on him because we figured it out and were validated by the outcome of the election. Would there be as much Biden hatred if Harris had won, or if he hadn’t done the debate before the election? Probably not.
If Biden were truly that nefarious and simply wanted to stay on due to arrogance, the arguments that he’s too far gone cognitively don’t make much sense either. There’s been this running joke of Biden being the grandpa who will fight tooth and nail when the family attempts to put him in a nursing home, but that’s mistaken. One would only fight it if they either were truly too far gone, in which case they shouldn’t be able to govern— Democrats didn’t think that. Or it’s because they’re truly cognizant of the situation and are rejecting your pressure. If Biden represented the latter, then he was right all along about his cognition— he was just wrong about his popularity and or ability to make up the clout in the required timeframe. But that’s partially because we all maintained our support for him!
In the Democrats’ blaming of Joe Biden, they ended up in Thompson’s theory of agency: giving Biden all the agency and themselves none. But in a democracy, the People have power to make drastic changes, especially through consensus. Democrats decided not to do that and then blamed Biden for their mistake.
It’s too soon for any Democrat to come out claiming they never supported the Biden Admin, no one will believe them. But I think there will be some of those figures coming up soon. While I have my own criticisms of the Biden Admin, mainly to do with Israel and immigration, it’s clear to me any blame on Biden by Democrats must first be recognized as a criticism of oneself for not cutting him from the campaign sooner.