Then-Sen. Kamala Harris. Photo (cc) 2019 by Gage Skidmore.
My Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman writes for WBUR’s Cognoscenti about the challenges facing the media in covering Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, arguing that we ought to be wary of discussing Harris’ “viability” — a “vague term [that] is often code for a lingering — and likely inaccurate — perception that women are somehow less electable than men.” She continues:
The viability question comes packaged with observations about a candidate’s “likability,” “broad appeal” and “strength.” Can she win over moderate suburban voters? Does she look presidential? Is she authentic? These factors do matter, especially when the narrow path to victory winds through a few swing states — think back to 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and lost the election — but they also carry a specific type of misogyny, one that’s cloaked as pragmatism and deeply internalized across the political spectrum.
Meg’s conclusion: The media have gotten better, as shown by their mostly non-gendered coverage of Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign. But Vice President Harris, who has a genuine chance of becoming the first female president, presents a larger and trickier test.
President Biden in the Oval Office on Wednesday. Photo via the Biden White House.
I found President Biden’s address Wednesday night to be sad and moving. His theme was democracy and how we can preserve it. His 2020 victory over Donald Trump saved us from authoritarianism to an extent that no one realized when they cast their ballots. After all, it was only afterwards that Trump launched his effort to steal the election by any means necessary, including fomenting violence in the halls of Congress.
Biden proved not to be up to the challenge of defeating Trump again. Fortunately, by stepping aside and handing off his campaign to Vice President Kamala Harris, he has energized the anti-Trump movement and given it a chance of prevailing this November, though there are no guarantees.
There was nothing in Biden’s 11-minute Oval Office speech that would make anyone doubt the wisdom of his decision to end his re-election campaign. His voice was hoarse and halting, and before you blame COVID, keep in mind that this is the Biden we have come to know in recent months. Louise Aronson, a gerontologist who was one of the formerly anonymous physicians interviewed by The New Yorker last week, observed for The Atlantic (free link) that “his voice was weak, he stumbled occasionally over his prepared remarks, and his physical presence was diminished from what it once was.” She added:
Part of what was so excruciating about watching Biden hold on to his hope of winning a second term was seeing someone struggle to accept that their best-case scenario might be impossible. Variations of this situation play out daily in clinics and hospitals, and if you have a shred of empathy, it’s always heartbreaking. Yet few such difficult conversations — or the loud silences that too often take the place of these conversations — happen so publicly. Watching this one reminded me how unwelcome they are in American life, even in the offices of physicians delivering bad news.
The historian Heather Cox Richardson has a thorough overview of Biden’s address, writing that he joins George Washington in his willingness to walk away and John Adams in presiding over a peaceful transition. “Like them, Biden gave up the pursuit of power for himself in order to demonstrate the importance of democracy,” Richardson said. “After the speech, the White House served ice cream to the Bidens and hundreds of White House staffers in the Rose Garden.”
And I’m sorry, but I have to single out Peter Baker of The New York Times for a particularly sour “news analysis” (I’m not wasting a gift link on it). Here’s an excerpt that is very much in keeping with the rest of what he wrote:
What there was not much of was introspection about how he had gotten to this moment of indignity. He may be focused on the soul of America, but he revealed little of his own. Indeed, if there has been much soul searching over these past days and weeks of personal and political trauma that led to this reluctant end of his storied half-century political career, the search has been called off. Or at least the results were not reported.
I don’t think Baker would have been satisfied unless Biden confessed he was becoming senile and thanked the Times for pointing it out. Baker takes an enormous amount of grief from liberal readers for his resolute both-sides-ism, and I often find the criticism to be overwrought. This time, though, any brickbats directed his way are well deserved.
Wednesday’s address was not a farewell for Biden. After all, he’ll be president until next January, and I’m sure he’ll be out on the campaign trail with Harris. Still, it marked the latest in a series of closing acts for the president beginning with his Sunday announcement. We are going to miss this good and decent man.
We were on our way back from a family gathering in upstate New York when we learned that President Biden had stepped aside from his re-election campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. I was checking social media at the Lee rest stop on the Mass Pike eastbound; I think I was about an hour behind. We’d been anticipating the moment for days, if not weeks. Still, it came as a surprise.
I’m hearing some people grouse that Biden should have acted sooner, but this had to be incredibly difficult. No doubt he believes he can still do the job. What he couldn’t do was govern and campaign simultaneously. Nor was it reasonable to expect voters to believe he could serve more than a fraction of a second term. He’s now given us the best chance of beating Donald Trump and the authoritarian menace he represents.
Harris is an accomplished leader who, after all, is already the elected vice president. Opening up the process to some sort of vague celebrity bakeoff could have led to disaster. Can Harris win? I don’t know. Every possible choice was a risk, but I think giving her a chance of claiming the nomination quickly is less of a risk than continuing with Biden or having an open convention. (To be clear: It will still be an open convention.)
There’s one important media angle to all this that I think needs to be addressed. It really looks like Biden was driven out of the campaign by the press, and that’s not a good perception. There have been stories over the past year or two suggesting that Biden shouldn’t run for re-election because of his advanced age, the three most notable being a Mark Leibovich piece in The Atlantic in 2022, an Ezra Klein commentary in The New York Times this past February, and a Wall Street Journal article in early June. But Biden’s age-related problems have been a 24/7 obsession since about 9:10 p.m. on June 27, when it became clear in the presidential debate that something was seriously wrong.
Many diehard Biden supporters have erupted in fury at the media, and especially the Times, for publishing story after story after story about Biden’s infirmities while not dwelling nearly as much on Trump’s far worse deficits. There are many on the left who’ve come to the conclusion that the corporate media — I’m not using quotation marks because there really is a corporate media — want to see Trump back in office for ratings and circulation. I don’t think that’s the case. Biden’s age, questions about his cognitive health, and fading electoral prospects were a huge and entirely legitimate story. But that doesn’t mean the media covered themselves in glory.
My own belief is that the media — again, led by the Times — were shocked and horrified by the prospect of Trump’s return to the White House, so they embarked on an overwrought effort to bring Biden’s campaign to a close. The Times put it this way in an editorial today: “Had he remained at the top of the ticket, he would have greatly increased the likelihood of Mr. Trump retaking the presidency and potentially controlling both houses of Congress as well.” That’s not just a statement of truth; it’s also an explanation for the media behavior we’ve seen over the past three weeks.
Jon Keller of WBZ-TV asked me the other day if this was evidence of “bias.” I responded that yes, I suppose it was. But it was bias in favor of democracy, something that media observers such as Margaret Sullivan and Jay Rosen have been calling for from the start of the campaign. This is not Bill Clinton versus Bob Dole in 1996. Trump represents an existential threat to democracy.
Still, the media excesses were notable, especially a Times report that a physician who specializes in Parkinson’s disease had visited the White House repeatedly. That was just irresponsible journalism. It didn’t pan out, and no evidence has emerged that Biden has Parkinson’s. Another example of excess was published by The New Yorker last week, in which nine physicians were allowed to speculate anonymously about the state of Biden’s neurological health. Now, I have to say that the story was interesting and possibly shed some light. But that doesn’t mean it should have been published.
President Biden said he will address the nation later this week. He could do Harris a lot of good if he acknowledges that he’s leaving not because of the media, not because fundraising had dried up, not because Nancy Pelosi told him to, but because his age and his health had finally caught up with him. And the media should ask themselves how they once again managed to turn a legitimate story into the only story for the past three weeks, embarrassing themselves and calling their judgment and fairness into question.
Biden has been an outstanding president, and he cements his legacy by knowing when it’s time to leave. He deserves our respect and gratitude. We are all going to miss his steady hand come next January, regardless of who succeeds him.
Events overtook my conversation with WBZ-TV political analyst Jon Keller. These two segments ran earlier today, before President Biden stepped aside from the 2024 campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. I hope you enjoy this anyway.
If you watched Donald Trump deliver his meandering, 90-minute acceptance speech, then you know what the main takeaway is: The Democrats can still win this if they pull themselves together and figure out what to do about the top of the ticket.
My own view is that President Biden needs to step aside in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris, and he needs to do it soon. Today? This weekend? But regardless of what happens, the Trump we saw last night — after 15 minutes of play-acting at being a unifying figure — was the same angry, lying, grievance-filled figure he’s always been.
I like how David Brooks put it: “There is no cure for narcissism. The part after the assassination-attempt story was one of the truly awful and self-indulgent political performances of our time. My brain has been bludgeoned into soporific exhaustion.”
If President Biden had handled himself in the debate the way he did at his news conference Thursday night, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. He was OK — far better than in the debate and better, too, than he was in his interview with George Stephanopoulos.
He navigated the weeds on foreign policy, rambling on in a way that demonstrated his deep knowledge of the international scene. I don’t care that he mixed up a few names — he always has. But he faded toward the end and lost some of his earlier coherence. I think he helped himself a little. And that creates a dilemma. It’s one thing if he’s clearly unfit to run and to serve. It’s quite another if he comes across merely as low-energy and perhaps not up to the challenge of defeating the authoritarian menace that Donald Trump represents. What do you do then?
Writing on Threads, media observer Brian Stelter put it this way: “Millions of Democratic voters watched Biden’s press conference, and now some of them are wondering, ‘why are the chattering classes trying to force this man out of office?’”
If Biden had helped himself a lot, maybe we could exhale. If he’d melted down, well, the next steps would be obvious. But by helping himself a little, he left himself in a tenuous position, insisting he’s in the race to stay while much of the media and a rising tide of Democratic officials insist that the time has come for a new candidate.
Ah, yes, the media. They’ve been providing tough coverage of a story that’s of paramount importance — and they’ve been overdoing it, too. This has especially been true of The New York Times and CNN, which have been overloading us with stories about whether Biden is still fit to serve while playing down other news. Yes, that’s a hard accusation to make stick against the Times since it publishes so much about so many topics. But, day after day, its homepage has been dominated by upwards of a half-dozen stories about the latest on whether Biden might step aside. The Times is guilty of one serious misstep as well, botching a report that the president might be under evaluation for Parkinson’s disease.
So on we go. I suggest that we all calm down. If Biden needs to step aside, it doesn’t have to happen immediately. One option is to resign, making Vice President Kamala Harris the president. That’s the cleanest solution, presumably answering any questions about ballot access and campaign funds. A short sprint to Election Day might actually help her.
In any case, there was no reason to feel especially good or bad about what happened Thursday night.
We were at a Worcester Red Sox game Friday night, so we watched George Stephanopoulos’ interview with President Biden when we got home. I don’t think it moved the needle. Biden was neither strong enough to put the doubts to rest nor weak enough to accelerate calls for him to step aside.
Stephanopoulos did an admirable job of asking tough questions while maintaining a respectful tone. As for his repeated queries about whether Biden would agree to take a cognitive test, I was surprised that Biden didn’t answer that he would if Donald Trump would. But whatever.
Biden’s flat-out denial that he’s behind in the polls and that his approval rating is very low wasn’t great, but that seems to be his approach: dig in, even if it means contradicting reality. It would have been better if he’d said, “Yes, I’m behind, and here’s how I’m going to overcome it.”
And let me join with other commentators who were appalled at his answer to how he’ll feel next January if he loses to Trump: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.” No. The challenge we are all facing is how to beat authoritarianism. The Democrats need to meet that challenge with their strongest candidate, whether it’s Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris or someone else.
George Stephanopoulos interviews President Biden in 2021. White House photo.
Right now we’re all waiting to see how President Biden does in his interview with George Stephanopoulos. Obviously Biden has to come off as coherent, and even then it’s not going to stop calls for him to step aside in the midst of donor panic and declining poll numbers. The New York Times and The Boston Globe are reporting that Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey has been telling associates that Biden’s candidacy is “irretrievable.”
Given the terrible position in which we find ourselves, it’s worth asking whether the media should have covered Biden differently over the past few months. My Northeastern University colleague Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of the Times, thinks so, writing a commentary for Semafor that begins:
It’s clear the best news reporters in Washington have failed in the first duty of journalism: to hold power accountable. It is our duty to poke through White House smoke screens and find out the truth. The Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover-up of the degree of the President’s feebleness and his serious physical decline, which may be simply the result of old age. Shame on the White House press corps for not to have pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the President.
Richard Tofel, a former top executive at The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica, has been reminding us on social media that he’s been calling for greater scrutiny of Biden’s age since last October. Here’s part of what he said back then:
Is Biden speaking more slowly because he’s conscious that his lifelong stutter might now be taken for cognitive frailty, or because he has no choice? Is he walking more cautiously because he knows the political peril of falling, or because he can no longer go any faster? If you think you know the answers to those questions, what is your evidence? I know of very little, either way.
My own sense is that there was actually quite a bit of reporting on Biden’s age even before his disastrous June 27 debate with Donald Trump, but that it was discounted for a variety of reasons. When special counsel Robert Hur called Biden “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” that got plenty of coverage. At the same time, though, Hur was arguably engaging in prosecutorial misconduct by adding his own commentary while not bringing charges against Biden — which, in turn, reminded people of then-FBI Director James Comey trashing Hillary Clinton in 2016 over the way she handled her emails even while concluding she had not committed a crime.
The Wall Street Journal published an in-depth story on Biden’s age-related issues in early June, but that was widely dismissed because of the Journal’s reliance on partisan Republican sources, including former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who had previously told aides privately that he found the president to be sharp in White House meetings.
The Times itself has spent months obsessing over what voters think about Biden’s age, which in turn brought about accusations of both-sides-ism and false equivalence given that Trump is nearly as old and arguably more addled as well as an insurrectionist and a convicted criminal who’s been found liable for sexual assault.
The national media wasn’t dodging the story: The biggest newspapers in the country published lengthy stories about Biden’s mental fitness. The public wasn’t in the dark about Biden’s age: Most voters (67 percent in a June Gallup poll) thought he was too old to be president even before the debate. But questions about Biden’s fitness for office were not emphasized as much as they should have been.
That’s the third option: The stories should have been tougher, the volume should have been louder.
Then, too, journalists are not unaware of what we’re facing. A second Trump term could amount to nothing less than the end of democracy in this country. Surely there was a sense that as long as Biden wasn’t too impaired, it wasn’t worth the risk of throwing the election into chaos and risking Trump’s return to office — this time as the head of the authoritarian right.
If Biden could somehow make it across the finish line this November, so this thinking went, it would be up to God and Vice President Kamala Harris after that. I definitely count myself among those observers who dismissed concerns about Biden’s age, partly because I thought they were overblown, partly because I feared the consequences of removing Biden from the top of the ticket.
Vice President Kamala Harris. Photo (cc) 2019 by Gage Skidmore.
The Boston Globe’s editorial board has just called for President Biden to end his re-election campaign. The paper took its time, which I think is appropriate. But given the president’s anemic response to his disastrous performance in last Thursday’s debate, it’s now clear that someone else would be better suited to the crucial task of saving our democracy from Donald Trump and the forces of the authoritarian right. The Globe writes:
Serious questions are now in play about his ability to complete the arduous work of being leader of the free world. Can he negotiate with a hostile Republican Congress, dangerous foreign powers, or even fractious rivals within his own Cabinet? The nation’s confidence has been shaken.
The Globe is also calling for an open convention. I understand the appeal. But the cleanest solution would be to hand off the presidency to Vice President Kamala Harris. Biden would have to resign in order to do that, and I realize that’s unfair. There’s no logical reason for him not to serve out the remainder of his term, but defeating Trump is of paramount importance. Harris is as popular, or unpopular, as any of the other Democrats being mentioned, and with her ascendance there would be no issues regarding campaign finances or ballot access.
The New York Times is reporting that Biden told an unnamed key ally that he is thinking about ending his campaign. The Times is getting furious pushback from the White House, but how could Biden not be having such conversations? Former President Barack Obama is also letting it be known that his full-throated support for Biden is mainly for public consumption.
Maybe Biden will put the doubts to rest in his interview with George Stephanopoulos. Maybe he’ll hold a two-hour news conference, as Jake Tapper has suggested, and turn back the clock. Right now, though, he appears to be on a trajectory that will end, inevitably, with his making a very different calculation.
If President Biden is determined to brazen this out, and it appears that he is, then we need to see a lot more of Vice President Kamala Harris. Voters need to be reassured that she’s up to the job of succeeding him.
