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Political Malpractice Can't Be Tolerated
Bidenworld really let us down. Not next time.
mister mix
April 09, 2025
I’ve tried to avoid relitigating the Biden decision to drop out because it’s not productive — unless there’s a lesson for the future of the Democratic Party. As more news leaks out of those close to Biden, it’s becoming clear that Biden’s 2024 run was a product of massive political malpractice by his team that’s worth at least a short discussion.
In a book excerpt in Vanity Fair, Chris Whipple describes how Biden quit his run for the Presidency, and it’s very ugly. First, it’s clear that as far back as 2020, Biden’s advisors knew that he wasn’t fit to campaign. They were relieved that he could run his campaign over Zoom from the basement of his house in Delaware.
Second, key Democrats like Bill Daley, Obama’s second chief of staff, went on the record describing the denial in the Biden White House:
Over Saint Patrick’s Day weekend 2024, at a small White House party, Biden spoke to guests using a teleprompter. Daley (who, on a dozen visits to the White House, was never invited to drop in on Biden) couldn’t believe it. If the president needed a script for a small gathering of Irish guys, how would he survive the rigors of a campaign? “How are they letting this thing go on?” he thought. “This is crazy.”
Daley ran into his friend Tom Donilon, a long-time national security expert and brother of Biden’s adviser Mike. Why hadn’t anyone spoken to the president about stepping aside and giving someone else a chance to beat Trump? “How are they letting this fucking thing go on?” Daley asked him. Donilon shook his head. “I don’t believe there’s anyone who’s had the conversation with him about not running, including my brother,” he said. If Mike Donilon, Biden’s alter ego, hadn’t spoken to the president about his age, it was almost certain that no one had.
Nor did Democrats dare talk about Biden’s age—at least in public. “Everyone ignored it,” said Daley. Challenging the incumbent president could be a political death wish. “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.”
As with the Republicans and Trump, Democrats had a collective action problem. Many of them knew that Biden wasn’t fit to run for a second term, but none of them had the courage to be the first to say it. Biden’s staff were living in la-la land, thinking that Trump’s insurmountable lead in the polls could be overcome once Biden got on the stump. And the story of the debate prep is just pathetic. Biden was too focused on foreign policy to concentrate on the debate — he was exhausted and uninterested. Nobody around Biden was willing to go to the mat to tell him to rest up, to concentrate on domestic policy, and to take the election seriously.
The portrait that emerges in the piece is an old man past his prime, and his enablers.
This is a key issue with the Democratic Party — we don’t demand that our old politicians retire. I’ve said my piece about this before. It isn’t ageism to expect people who can’t do the job to quit. Our country is about to fall to pieces and a good part of the reason is that an old man wasn’t able to know that it was time to let someone else take over.
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