JULY 25, 2024:
Extended version:
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Wednesday (July 24, 2024) delivered a solemn call to voters to defend the country’s democracy as he laid out in an Oval Office address his decision to drop his bid for reelection and throw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris.
Insisting that “the defense of democracy is more important than any title,” Biden used his first public address since his announcement Sunday that he was stepping aside to deliver an implicit repudiation of former President Donald Trump. He did not directly call out Trump, whom he has called an existential threat to democracy. The 10-minute address also gave Biden a chance to try to shape how history will remember his one and only term in office.
“Nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy,” Biden said, in a somber coda to his 50 years spent in public office. “And that includes personal ambition.”
It was a moment for the history books — a U.S. president reflecting before the nation on why he was taking the rare step of voluntarily handing off power. It hasn’t been done since 1968, when Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek reelection in the heat of the Vietnam War.
“I revere this office,” Biden said. “But I love my country more.”
Trump, just an hour earlier at a campaign rally, revived his baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Biden. His refusal to concede inspired the Capitol insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, which Biden called “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”
Biden skirted the political reality that brought him to that point: His abysmal performance in a debate against Trump nearly a month ago, where he spoke haltingly, appeared ashen and failed to rebut his predecessor’s attacks, sparked a crisis of confidence from Democrats. Lawmakers and ordinary voters questioned not just whether he was capable of beating Trump in November, but also whether, at 81, he was still fit for the high-pressure job.
Biden, who said he believed his record was deserving of another term in office, tried to outlast the skepticism and quell the concerns with interviews and tepid rallies, but the pressure to end his campaign only mounted from the party’s political elites and from ordinary voters.
“I have decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation,” Biden said, saying he wanted to make room for “fresh voices, yes, younger voices.”
He added, “That is the best way to unite our nation.”
It was a belated fulfillment of his 2020 pledge to be a bridge to a new generation of leaders — and a bow to the drumbeat of calls from within his party to step aside.
Biden’s address was carried live by the major broadcast and cable news networks. He spooled out an weighty to-do list for his last six months in office, pledging to remain focused on being president until his term expires at noon on Jan. 20, 2025. He said he would work to end the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, fight to boost government support to cure cancer, address climate change and push for Supreme Court reform.
The president sought to use the address to outline the stakes in the election, which both Biden and Harris have framed as a choice between freedom and chaos, but he tried to steer clear of overt campaigning from his official office.
“The great thing about America is here, kings and dictators do not rule,” Biden said. “The people do. History is in your hands. The power is in your hands. The idea of America — lies in your hands.”
Biden was also making the case for his legacy of sweeping domestic legislation and the renewal of alliances abroad. But the way history will remember his time in office and his historic decision to step aside is intertwined with Harris’ electoral result in November, particularly as the vice president runs tightly on the achievements of the Biden administration.
His advisers say he intends to hold campaign events and fundraisers benefiting Harris, whom Biden praised as “tough” and “capable,” albeit at a far slower pace than if he had remained on the ballot himself.
Harris advisers will ultimately have to decide how to deploy the president, whose popularity sagged as voters in both parties questioned his fitness for office.
Biden, aides say, knows that if Harris loses, he’ll be criticized for staying in the race too long and not giving her or another Democrat time to effectively mount a campaign against Trump. If she wins, she’ll ensure his policy victories are secured and expanded, and he’ll be remembered for a Washingtonian decision to step aside for the next generation of leadership.
Biden said he’s grateful to have served as president — nowhere else would a kid with a stutter grow up to sit in the Oval Office.
“I’ve given my heart and my soul to our nation,” he said. “I’ve been blessed a million times in return.”
Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday that any question of Biden resigning his office before the election — which would allow Harris to run as an incumbent — was “ridiculous.”
Jean-Pierre said Biden has “no regrets” about his decision to stay in the race as long as he did, or his decision to quit it over the weekend. She said Biden’s decision had nothing to do with his health.
Trump, who watched Biden’s remarks from his private jet, posted on his social media platform that the president “was barely understandable, and sooo bad!”
As he spoke inside the Oval Office, Biden was joined off-camera by family members, including his wife, Jill, son Hunter, daughter Ashley and several grandchildren. Hundreds of administration aides held a watch party in the White House and gathered in the Rose Garden afterward to hear Biden thank them for their service. Outside the gates, supporters of Biden gathered holding signs that read “We love Joe,” and a brass band played.
Extended version:
REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. (AP) — President Joe Biden says he’s “determined to get as much done” as he possibly can in his final six months in the White House as he tries to beat back a defining force that his lame-duck predecessors struggled to vanquish: diminished relevance.
Biden hopes to keep the spigot flowing with hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding from a series of major legislative wins early in his term — signature policy victories that could be undone should Republican Donald Trump return to the White House.
He also badly wants Israel and Hamas to agree to his proposed three-phase cease-fire deal to bring home remaining Israeli hostages and potentially pave the way for an end to the nine-month-old war in Gaza. That would require no small measure of risk by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leadership.
Biden also will press to quickly fill federal judiciary vacancies — currently there are 48 openings — and make other federal agency appointments, but he will undoubtedly face pushback from Senate Republicans who want to keep Biden from notching any end-of-term wins.
Biden, in short, is rallying his team to help him defy political gravity.
“I’m still going to be fully fully engaged,” a gravelly voiced Biden, who is recovering from COVID-19 at his beach home in Delaware, promised staffers during a Monday call-in to his former campaign headquarters.
At the White House, staff are waiting for Biden’s expected return on Tuesday (July 23, 2024) after he spent the last six days convalescing.
White House chief of staff Jeff Zients on Monday urged aides to keep their heads down and remain focused on the work that remains. He listed lowering housing and health care costs, implementing the administration’s key legislative achievements, and safeguarding democracy as among Biden’s top priorities for the final months of the administration.
The message is being echoed throughout the administration. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told senior State Department officials that Biden wants his team to remain laser focused on carrying out his foreign policy agenda. Blinken noted that there is still “one-eighth” of Biden’s term to go, according to State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
Biden, who is scheduled to meet with Israel’s Netanyahu later this week, said during his call to campaign staff that he was focused on getting a cease-fire agreement and expressed optimism that a deal was close. His standing with some in his liberal base has plummeted as the death toll in Gaza has mounted. More than 39,000 people have died, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
“I’ll be working really closely with the Israelis and with the Palestinians to try to work out how we can get the Gaza war to end and Middle East peace and get all those hostages home,” Biden told campaign staff. “I think we’re on the verge of being able to do that.”
Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. Middle East peace negotiator, said that a cease-fire deal appears closer than it has been through the conflict.
Netanyahu has faced pressure from the far-right members of his coalition to resist any deal that stops Israel from eliminating Hamas in Gaza. But the Israeli prime minister may have some wiggle room when the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, begins a three-month recess July 28. Far-right members of his coalition would be unable to hold a no-confidence vote during that period.
Biden’s leverage on Netanyahu, who is set to address Congress on Wednesday as part of his Washington visit, remains limited. And ramping up rhetorical pressure on Netanyahu, who wants to demonstrate to an Israeli audience that he remains popular on Capitol Hill and can withstand any pressure from the White House, is perilous, Miller said.
“You might get a cease-fire no matter what Biden does or doesn’t do,” added Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Biden and Kamala Harris have to be careful with respect to how Republicans may interpret, exploit and use anything that is seen as pressure on Israel.”
Lame-duck presidents have used the waning days of their presidencies to take big shots at weighty policy.
In 2008, President George W. Bush signed into law a $700 billion bailout of the financial services industry weeks before Barack Obama defeated Republican John McCain. Bush also signed off on more than $17 billion to keep America’s auto industry afloat in the final weeks of his presidency as the economy tanked.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton launched negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat at Camp David, Maryland, in one last — and ultimately unsuccessful — effort at winning Middle East peace at the end of his presidency.
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s efforts to end the war in Vietnam in the final months of his presidency flamed out in 1968. Historians have pointed to evidence that Democrat Johnson’s successor, Republican Richard Nixon, covertly sought to slow the effort out of fear that an agreement could hurt his election chances.
The foreign policy space — particularly helping seal an Israel-Hamas cease-fire agreement — might be Biden’s best hope for a final legacy-defining moment.
“Between Ukraine and Gaza, the Biden national security team has been stretched. They have more than enough on their plate,” said Gordon Gray, a former U.S. ambassador to Tunisia who is now a professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. “Realistically, there might not be enough time for big breakthroughs.”
William Howell, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, said lame-duck status does inevitably constrain a presidency but it doesn’t necessarily have to make one inert.
Howell said that Biden, who has vowed to help propel Harris’ White House bid, may be able to turn himself into a juggernaut on the campaign trail now that he’s acceded to pressure from the deep-pocketed donors who threatened to withhold cash if he didn’t exit the campaign.
“His most important job over the new few months is setting the conditions to make Kamala Harris successful,” Howell said.
