Unburdened: On Biden's exit and Harris' anointment

The toughest spectacle for Joe Biden must be the irony of his finally receiving the sort of gauzy encomiums from everyone he’d long felt could never hand it to him in the first place. “Nothing in his life so became him like the leaving it,” Malcolm says of the traitorous Thane of Cawdor in “Macbeth.” In Biden’s case the treachery went quite the other way.

Days ago he was being denounced as a shaggy lion in winter, leading America to certain catastrophe through his stubborn refusal to quit the race. Now he is a statesman in the mold of Washington, putting country above ego, who saved America from an accomplished catastrophe once and is now ready to do so a second time, if only through his absence. The comeback kid is finally getting good press for going away.

The tragedy of seeing a public servant of fifty years exit in the way Biden has is mitigated only slightly by a palpable sense of relief coming from everyone who claimed, through grit teeth and perma-smiles on cable news for the last three weeks, that there was never anything to worry about. Liberal hypocrisy has never been more welcome.

The Democratic Party showed more discipline, organization and cohesion in six hours on a hot summer Sunday than it had in six months. Witness the lightning-fast endorsements of Kamala Harris from both Clintons, Nancy Pelosi (the main catalyst, if not the architect, of Biden’s fateful decision), and the two governors rumored to be challengers for any open contest for the nomination, Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer. A record-breaking $81 million fundraising haul in 24 hours, 60 percent of it from first-time donors to the 2024 race, suggests a lack of Geritol on the ticket was the problem all along.

There has been an equally dramatic about-face in Trumpland. Having built a campaign squarely around Biden’s cognitive impairment and unpopularity, the Republican nominee’s confidence in a landslide victory – repackaged, implausibly, as a “unity” platform in the aftermath of his own near-miss assassination – now descends into the familiar sewer of paranoia, conspiracism and hysteria. The former reality TV star cannot believe this late season plot twist. Trump insisted for three-and-a-half years that Biden was an illegitimate president who stole an election from him. Now he insists Biden is the legitimate incumbent he is entitled to beat all over again. Trump characterized an insurrection he fomented using a mob that wanted to lynch his own running mate as little more than a zealous exercise of civic virtue. Now he calls the voluntary retirement of the leader of the free world a “threat to democracy.”

Trump’s surrogates, meanwhile, suggest something even more sinister is afoot: a long-planned “coup” by America’s intelligence community and/or Democratic insiders who have somehow tricked Biden into quitting — or even forged his signature on a letter he’s not yet aware exists. And so he sits in Rehoboth Beach, not an elderly man recovering from Covid who saw the writing on the hall, but our own befuddled Gorbachev held hostage in his dacha by America’s KGB.

This is all darkly amusing and would be even more so if the stakes of this election weren’t so high, not just for the United States but, more immediately, for Ukraine and the Middle East.

Let’s start with the simple fact that there is bad news coming – there always is. The 24-hour news cycle will look for whatever failings or shortcomings in Harris it missed in her vice presidency or her anticlimactic primary race in 2019, some of it fed by Trump’s opposition researchers.

People are worried about her favorability (lower than Biden and Trump’s in Pennsylvania!) and her charisma deficit. She is prone to silly laughs, awkward walks and verbal infelicities. So it’s a good thing, then, that the man who invites Russia to invade NATO allies and wants to imprison his political opponents drinks water with two hands and compares illegal immigrants to a make-believe psychiatrist cannibal from Lithuania.

For what it’s worth, Harris did rather well on her first day as the presumptive nominee, playing up her career as a prosecutor and attorney general in California, one who, as she put it, locked up “predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” a line that hardly needed the shin-kicking followup about whom this should remind us of. She’s also doing to her public perception what Biden could not with his Lear-like degeneration: making fun of it.

The 404 error page of her “Harris for President” website says it “exists in the context of all that came before,” with buttons for small-dollar donations below. Harris uttered this highly memed word salad in March 2023 in the course of trying to quote her Indian mother during a swearing-in ceremony for officials tasked with growing education opportunities for minorities, of which Harris is one twice over. (In case you hadn’t noticed, she is also Black.) A more recognizable version of what she meant is: no man is an island. True enough, but that won’t wind up on t-shirts in Chicago in August.

There are already affectionate mashups on Twitter of Harris and her fictional doppelganger, Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus on the HBO series Veep, which is about – ahem – a seemingly inconsequential politician selected for the sinecure of vice president who, against all odds, becomes president when her boss resigns. (Veep’s showrunner Armando Iannucci once said he couldn’t satirize Donald Trump because there wasn’t anything left to exaggerate.) If Harris’ campaign is smart they’ll invite Louis-Dreyfus to campaign alongside her, not just because it’s the sort of thing Democrats always do with Hollywood celebrities, but because any transcendence of the parody would bolster voter confidence in Harris’ abilities and demonstrate that she was written off too soon four years ago and underestimated ever since. (Biden ran for president three times and became the butt of innumerable also-ran jokes as vice president before surprising everyone by clinching the nomination and White House in 2020.)

Resilience and euphoria should also be met with stoicism and self-restraint. If there is one lesson in Biden’s decline and fall to be learned by Biden supporters it is that the media is not on its honor when it fails to be skeptical, and when it is skeptical it is usually right to be. Much of what we know about why Trump is a clear and present danger to the country comes from the very newspapers Biden’s online praetorian guard a week ago insisted were not telling us the truth about Trump – or not enough of the truth. The delusion persists among the anxious Democratic activist corps that we are just one more scandal away from this man’s undoing because voters don’t know the real Trump yet. In reality, Trump is, apart from Joe Biden, one of the most examined politicians of the modern era.

The grim prospect of his second term has so far withstood decades of tabloid and mainstream scrutiny into his public and private affairs, an FBI counterintelligence probe, a succession of special prosecutor and congressional investigations, audits, two impeachments, multiple bankruptcies, an attempt to overthrow his own government, a civil fraud conviction, an adjudication of sexual assault, 88 criminal indictments, three failed marriages (including the current one), and 34 felony convictions for bribing a porn star he slept with.

In the context of all that has come before, you are very welcome to believe there’s an Epstein photo or Deutsche Bank loan agreement lying around somewhere that will finally make the world safe for democracy. But I’m not betting on my profession to do us any eleventh-hour favors, and neither should you.

For better or worse, this is now Harris’ case to make – or try. She’s got all the evidence she needs and is off to a decent start.