Senator Peter Welch of Vermont on Wednesday became the first Democratic senator to publicly call on President Biden to withdraw as the party’s presidential candidate in the aftermath of his disastrous debate performance last month.
“We can’t unsee what we saw,” Mr. Welch said in an interview shortly after publishing an op-ed in The Washington Post in which he called for Mr. Biden to end his campaign and allow another Democrat to take on former President Donald J. Trump. He said the president’s stumbles during the debate had only reinforced — rather than allayed — concerns about his ability to run a successful campaign.
“Age was a big issue going into the debate, and it was an opportunity, obviously, that the White House saw to put that to rest, and coming out of the debate, it intensified it,” the first-term senator said. “And that’s a real problem.”
Mr. Welch, 77, said his decision to call on the president to step aside was extremely difficult because he and voters in his home state “love Joe Biden.” He touted the 2020 election results, in which Vermonters delivered Mr. Biden the highest percentage victory of any state in the country.
But he said those same voters had deep anxieties about the future, fearing that four years under a second Trump administration would remove any chance of extending progressive policies championed by Mr. Biden and could wipe away the progress they have supported over the last four years.
Mr. Welch said it had become an existential issue for him to consider the threat of another Trump presidency, and that his determination was that Mr. Biden was not up to beating the former president.
“It’s not the elites in Vermont who are talking to me,” Mr. Welch said, brushing back an argument that Mr. Biden has made in recent days as he has defiantly refused to leave the race. “It’s the working-class mother who’s got two kids and is hoping maybe we can get the child care tax back. It’s kids who are working in AmeriCorps just to do cleanup and environmental work who are terrified that all the achievements of the Biden administration on the environment are going to be erased if we get a Trump presidency.”
“It’s a catastrophe,” he added.
The senator said he is not blind to the risks that could come should Mr. Biden step down, but rejected comparisons to the meltdown Democrats faced in 1968, when chaos and violence at the party convention in Chicago contributed to then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s loss in the general election that November.
“One of the achievements of Joe Biden is that he has unified the Democratic Party — everyone from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin,” Mr. Welch said. “And what that means is that if we have to go through ‘Who’s our next candidate?,’ it’s going to be among people who are all committed to the Biden commitment to save democracy, the Biden commitment to the environment, the Biden commitment to women’s rights.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
