US President Joe Biden withdrawal from the presidential polls may not help his Democratic Party, but in acknowledging that his chances of reelection were diminishing by the minute he has done the right thing in stepping away though he may have erred in leaving it till late.
Biden ended weeks of speculation with a deeply personal decision that he took while in isolation for a recurrence of the Covid infection. Informing aides in his closest inner circle only minutes before putting it out on social media, he accepted that what he has done is in the best interests of his party and the US.
There were two events that defined this slide into agonising uncertainty as his fellow Democrats fretted over his advanced age of 81 and his increasingly poor polling numbers. The first was his faltering performance in the televised debate that brought on the worst concerns over possible deterioration in cognitive functions.
Biden tried various things to mitigate his situation including a disastrous meeting with world leaders during which he addressed Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and thought Donald Trump was his vice-president.
The second, and probably more decisive event that shaped the presidential polls of November was the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump, which he escaped by a hair’s breadth and at once transformed into a martyr in the eyes of not only his most ardent Republican Party supporters.
Biden may have been pushed to a corner from where he was condemned to defeat if he stayed on in the contest, but his party was doomed anyway in the polls because he withdrew when only 105 days were left for November 5. And yet he did the noble thing in placing the priorities of others ahead of his own desire to try and stay on in the world’s most powerful job.
The political pundits, savvy bookmakers and vast sections of the US people may have convinced themselves already that the race is over, and that Trump is a shoo-in for the job in a second term that is inevitable now, regardless of how chaotic his first term to 2020 as a maverick president may have been.
Biden’s support of his deputy, Kamala Harris, born to a black Jamaican and Tamil parents, was a given considering how faithful the Vice-President has been — a loyalist who never nursed a vaulting ambition of going for the boss’s chair. It would be interesting to see if the Democratic Party thinks like Biden.
The advantage as the Democrats scramble now to pick their two candidates for the ticket, at the party convention slated for August 19-22 in Chicago when the voices of 4,600 delegates with the power to determine who will run for President would have to be heard is with the Republicans.
It is in the realm of speculation whether Biden has done too little too late in withdrawing at this hour, but it is apparent that a relatively quiet campaign in Trump’s corner is coming with renewed hostility against those who may be on the Democratic ticket, be it Kamala in the lead now and a State Governor as her pick for vice-president, or two candidates not too well known beyond the US.
As Trump is never short of the bombastic in putting down opponents with withering throwaway lines, it may be America’s burden to prepare for the second coming of the realtor and reality show protagonist, aged 78, whose faith in God has gone up several notches since the bullet hit an ear but missed his head. It does appear now that every Republican’s choice for President is a tearaway front runner in the race to the White House.
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