2024-07-22 05:09:28
“To my fellow Americans, over the last three and a half years we have made great progress as a nation.” Joe Biden then sums up some of those achievements: the US economy, he says, is “the strongest in the world”; under his mandate, the price of medicines was lowered and health benefits were increased; the first gun control law in thirty years was passed and the Supreme Court selected the first African-American woman in its history. None of this was enough to make his supporters ease the pressure exerted since the debate to force his resignation, given that almost all the polls gave Trump a victory at the polls less than four months before the elections.
In a second message, also posted on X, although this time addressed to Democrats, Biden announced within minutes that he supported the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him at the head of the campaign.
Both announcements open a period of uncertainty with unforeseeable consequences for the United States and put an end to almost four weeks of doubts about his physical and mental abilities to continue four more years in the White House. They also put an end to increasing pressure, in public and in private, from donors, strategists, analysts, the media, senators, congressmen and from his leaders in both Houses, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, as well as from key figures of the Democratic Party such as Nancy Pelosi or former President Barack Obama.
First, there was the “panic” felt by his supporters when they saw him erratic, from lapse to lapse, on the television set that CNN had set aside in Atlanta for the first presidential debate. Then came the editorial in The New York Times calling for his resignation and the first Democratic legislators to sign up to the list of those who begged him to consider it, which grew in number and prominence of its signatories until it exceeded thirty. This Sunday, a final prominent name was added: that of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who had resigned from the party in May but still represented it on Capitol Hill.
Last Friday, Biden announced his intention to return to the campaign trail next week. Finally, the candidate, who spent all this time defending his ability to carry out the job and beat Trump, despite the evidence against him, gave in to pressure and made a historic decision, which brings the United States into uncharted territory.
The most pressing question is whether the party will agree or not to Harris being the successor. There is not much time for discussions: the Democratic National Convention is being held in Chicago between August 19 and 22. It is not just that we have to go to that meeting with our homework done to avoid a chaotic spectacle like the one in 1968. But there is another deadline before that: the party has set itself the end of the first week of August as the deadline to virtually name the chosen one, whether it is Biden or someone else.
Some Democratic voices, led by Pelosi, have advocated holding mini-primaries. If Harris is chosen by the party for the November ballot by means of this express election or by the logic of Biden’s appointment, the vice president still remains unclear as to who would accompany her.
When Biden chose her as his second-in-command in the 2020 election, he did so for the symbolism of introducing someone who would become the first woman and the first Black person and person of Asian descent to serve as vice president, but also because of her age. Harris is 59, and Biden campaigned in that election as a mere “bridge” to younger generations.
By the time he broke the record as the longest-serving president of the United States, he had already changed his mind, and in April 2023 he launched his candidacy to renew what is perhaps the most difficult job in the world: leader of the world’s leading power. Doubts about whether he was fit to do so go back much further than the June 27 debate, although both his Administration and his allies and the liberal media tended to downplay them. The first serious warning sign came this year, when special prosecutor Robert Hur, in charge of investigating Biden’s handling of confidential papers that he still possessed without permission after leaving his post as Obama’s vice president (2009-2017), said in his report that the president was unable to remember the name of his son, Beau, who died in 2015, and described him as “an old man with a bad memory.”
THE COUNTRY
2024-07-22 05:09:28