Don’t quit, Joe, there is time to recover before the elections - opinion

The last time an incumbent president chose not to run we wound up with the most corrupt president in history – until Donald Trump came along. The American people, the country, and the world deserve better.

Joe Biden is better. He doesn’t walk as nimbly as he used to. What the hell, FDR couldn’t walk at all. And his voice was getting raspy at this year’s first presidential debate on Thursday night in Atlanta, but he got it back the morning after and it’s being heard on the stump since then. He didn’t suddenly get old, and if he had a cold someone on his staff should have stopped at CVS for some lozenges.

Biden knew right away it was bad – “I get it” – and moved quickly to shore up support by admitting the problem. His next day speech to a North Carolina rally was “energetic,” reported The New York Times, which was already calling for him to drop out.

It seems so many Democrats are getting their tighty whities in a bunch because he looked and sounded old that night. He is old, but the question should be: Can he keep doing the job he’s been doing quite well for the past three and a half years? Too many in the media and Democratic party obsessed over Biden’s performance and overlooked Trump’s, perhaps because no one expected more than his usual lies, vitriol, and effluent.

Biden and I both came to Washington about the same time – he as the youngest member of the Senate while I went to work on the staff of senator Hubert Humphrey (D-Minnesota). Humphrey had just returned to the Senate (he was first elected in 1948 but left in 1964 to become vice president).

Lyndon Johnson decided not to seek a second term in 1968, and after a bitter and fractious campaign, Humphrey was nominated. But by then there was no time to heal the wounds that drove LBJ out, either inside the party or across the nation.

The convention in Chicago that summer was disastrous. One of my memories was of senator Abe Ribicoff of Connecticut accusing the police of excessive violence when confronting anti-war demonstrators, and the mayor of Chicago standing up and screaming at him, “Shut up, Kike.”

Trump's criminal record

I have no doubt Humphrey would have been a great president. He was a man of great compassion, energy, experience, ability, and commitment to the public good. That can’t be said of the man who defeated him, Richard Nixon.

Nixon had long before earned a well-deserved nickname, Tricky Dicky. He was famous for his dirty tricks and his face is tattooed on the back of one of his most notorious henchmen, Roger Stone, who fills that role today for Donald Trump.

Nixon protested “I am not a crook,” as does Trump, although already he has been convicted of 34 felony counts and faces dozens more indictments. A jury ordered him to pay $5 million to a woman it found he had sexually abused, which the judge said meant rape.

Watergate is like a traffic ticket next to the January 6 insurrection and attempts to steal the 2020 election.

SNOPES VERIFIED that Biden was accurate when he said “158 or 159 presidential historians” had voted Trump the worst president in US history. Yet the chattering class, and many of Biden’s fellow Democrats, overlooked the performance of his unworthy opponent as they obsessed on the president’s.

Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes captured the idiocy of the panic. “That decided it for me,” says the guy watching the television. “I’m voting for the guy who was convicted of 34 felonies and subverted our democracy by trying to overturn a free and fair election.”

Had Biden decided last year to retire, as he probably should have, there could have been an orderly transition, but mid-campaign is too late.

Replacing him will guarantee weeks or months of Democratic chaos in a wide-open brawl for the nomination, leaving a wounded and badly divided party to go into the election against a beatable foe. Ron Brownstein pointed out in The Atlantic what so many missed: ”Nothing in Trump’s performance convinced Democrats that he could not be beaten in November.”

“Trump’s debate was ‘even worse than you remember,’” author Paul Waldman noted on MSNBC.

In all the hand-wringing over Biden’s poor showing, it seemed easy to ignore the felonious former president’s pitiful performance. The lies, bigotry, deceptions, rage, threats, boasts, mangled sentences, memory lapses, and the familiar refusal to accept the outcome of any election he doesn’t win.

In just 90 minutes, Trump managed to insult Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Arab-Americans, Palestinians, Jews, immigrants, and other traditionally Democratic voters – all groups that have been threatening to stay home or vote for Trump. He said immigrants are “taking Black jobs” and Hispanic jobs, and he has said immigrants are “killers,” “criminals,” and “rapists” who are “poisoning the blood of our nation.”

He called the president of the United States a “Palestinian,” a racist slur that should wake up Arab- and Muslim-Americans who are saying they’re not voting for Biden because they don’t like his support for Israel’s war against Hamas.

Initial post-debate polls were unkind to Biden, but they didn’t show gains for Trump. Washington Post analyst Philip Bump said there is “lots of reason” to think Biden’s poor performance won’t weaken his standing.

The Post’s political writer Dan Balz feels “Biden has time to recover” with four months to show voters “he has the physical and mental stamina to serve another four years.”

I don’t expect another debate. Biden needs one to show he can get back on the stage and hit back hard, but Trump doesn’t want to give him that chance. The former president would prefer to keep reminding people about Sleepy Joe’s embarrassing night in Atlanta.

Biden has time to recover. He has a strong record to run on and an opponent who has disgraced this nation. Biden called him a “whiner” with “the morals of an alley cat.” He is also a pathological liar, convicted felon, isolationist, narcissist with a penchant for Hitlerian quotes, one who lacks impulse control, and is driven by grudges and grievances, who puts himself, not the nation, first.

This election will be decided not by the pollsters and pundits but by which candidate can motivate his followers to go and cast their ballots. Biden has been raising money to get out the vote, Trump has been raising money to stay out of jail.

This is no time for Democrats to panic. Joe Biden remains the best Democrat to beat Trump. It’s a time to rally around all their candidates up and down the ballot.

The writer is a Washington-based journalist, consultant, lobbyist, and former American Israel Public Affairs Committee legislative director.