Yet another Democratic Party thought leader has demanded that Joe Biden drop out of the 2024 presidential race.
Ezra Klein, the co-founder of Vox and now a columnist and podcast host at The New York Times, said he understood that many liberals would be angry at him for calling on Biden to go but that it was necessary.
“I want to say this clearly: I like Biden. I think he’s been a good president. I think he is a good president. I don’t like having this conversation. And I know a lot of liberals, a lot of Democrats are going to be furious at me for this show,” Klein said.
The 39-year-old went on to make a series of arguments as to why Biden should not stand again, including his age and lagging poll numbers:
The arguments I see even some smart Democrats making so they don’t have to look at this directly are self-defeating. The one I hear most often is that Trump is also old. He’s 77. He also mixes up names — he recently called Nancy Pelosi, Nikki Haley. He sometimes speaks in gibberish.
And it’s all true. But that is a reason to nominate a candidate who can exploit the fact that Trump is old and confused. The point is not to give Trump an even match. The point is to beat Trump.
Despite his obvious affection for the president, Klein said that Biden should now leave office as a “hero.”
“So yes, I think Biden, as painful as this is, should find his way to stepping down as a hero,” Klein said.
Klein went on to plead with Democratic Party stalwarts to persuade Biden to drop out of the race:
The people whom Biden listens to — Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Mike Donilon, Ron Klain, Nancy Pelosi, Anita Dunn — they need to get him to see this. Biden may come to see it himself.
I take nothing away from how hard that is, how much Biden wants to finish the job he has started, keep doing the good he believes he can do. Retirement can be, often is, a trauma. But losing to Donald Trump would be far worse.
However, it appears that Klein’s pleas are likely to fall on deaf ears, at least for the time being. Biden has already won landslide victories in all the Democratic primaries and has an effective lock on the nomination.
Meanwhile, his campaign chief Mitch Landrieu recently responded to growing speculation around Biden’s mental and physical capacity to hold office.
Asked by NBC’s Kristen Welker his reaction to such speculation, Landrieu’s answer was emphatic:
I’m in the process of doing it right now. And demonstrating that the president’s accomplishments have really been second to none, and Joe Biden’s going to get up every day. The one thing Joe Biden is never going to do is — count on this — he is never, ever going to quit. Because that’s not what he’s done his entire life.
Calls for Biden to drop out have accelerated in recent weeks following the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report into his alleged mishandling of classified documents.
The report concluded that although Biden had likely committed a crime, his declining cognitive ability meant that bringing charges against him would not be in the public interest. This naturally raised the question: if he is too fragile to stand trial, how can he possibly remain as leader of the free world?
