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      Should Biden Heed Calls to Drop Out?

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      Readers offer a range of views after an editorial that called on the president to leave the race after his poor debate performance.To the Editor:Re “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race” (editorial, June 30):Joe Biden is an extraordinary person, with a track record of service to this country he loves so much to prove it. Being its president has clearly been the pinnacle of that service.But it is time for Mr. Biden to have a heart-to-heart with his ego and recognize that the same altruism and passion that brought him to the White House must now guide him to the sidelines of this election. The stakes are too high, and his candidacy is too risky.To stay is to repeat the tragic miscalculation of another soldier for the good, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.Don’t lose your faith now, Joe. Do the right thing for democracy.Alison Daley StevensonWaldoboro, MaineTo the Editor:To paraphrase the great Mark Twain, your report of President Biden’s cognitive demise is greatly exaggerated. Not to mention premature.The president is probably one of the worst extemporaneous public speakers to hold his office. Age has made his lack of skill in this area worse, but that does not mean it has impaired his intellectual capacity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      This Isn’t All Joe Biden’s Fault

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      What Is the Democratic Party For?Top Democrats have closed ranks around Joe Biden since the debate. Should they?On Thursday night, after the first presidential debate, MSNBC’s Alex Wagner interviewed Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. “You were out there getting a chorus of questions about whether Biden should step down,” she said. “There is a panic that has set in.”Newsom’s reply was dismissive. “We gotta have the back of this president,” he said. “You don’t turn your back because of one performance. What kind of party does that?”Perhaps a party that wants to win? Or a party that wants to nominate a candidate that the American people believe is up to the job? Maybe the better question is: What kind of party would do nothing right now?In February, I argued that President Biden should step aside in the 2024 election and Democrats should do what political parties did in presidential elections until the 1970s: choose a ticket at their convention. In public, the backlash I got from top Democrats was fierce. I was a bed-wetter living in an Aaron Sorkin fantasyland.In private, the feedback was more thoughtful and frightened. No one tried to convince me that Biden was a strong candidate. They argued instead that he couldn’t be persuaded to step aside, that even if he could, Vice President Kamala Harris would lose the election and that if a convention didn’t choose Harris, passing her over would fracture the party. They argued not that Biden was strong but that the Democratic Party was weak.I think Democrats should give themselves a little bit more credit. Biden’s presidency is proof of the Democratic Party’s ability to act strategically. He didn’t win the Democratic nomination in 2020 because he set the hearts of party activists aflame. Support for him always lacked the passion of support for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or even Andrew Yang. Biden won because the party made a cold decision to unite around the candidate it thought was best suited to beating Donald Trump. Biden won because Democrats did what they had to do, not what they wanted to do.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Forget Defeating Trump. Biden Needs to Spare the Country Four More Years of Himself.

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      Now that the first general-election debate of 2024 has removed any doubt about the necessity of removing President Biden from the Democratic ticket, you will hear a lot of serious liberals make the case for Biden’s removal primarily as a means to defeat Donald Trump. Biden must step aside, the argument will go, because he’s going to lose the election and only a different Democrat can save the country from Trumpian misrule.This is a necessary argument for its intended audiences: Americans who fear Trump above all else and a Democratic Party motivated by partisan self-interest. It is emphatically the case that sticking with Biden now gives Trump his best chance at an easy victory — a better chance even than nominating Kamala Harris, who might be a terrible candidate but would still be better than her boss at this point. It is definitely true that if you believe America needs to be saved from Trumpism 2.0, continuing with Biden is a grave dereliction.But it’s also important, especially for those of us who are not Democratic partisans, to emphasize that declining to nominate Biden is essential not just if you hope to avert a second Trump term. It’s essential if you want to protect the country from a second Biden term — from the ways that his obvious deterioration endangers the country that he nominally leads.That is to say, if a genie or fairy godmother appeared to Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Jill Biden and granted them the foreknowledge that Biden would somehow eke out a victory over Trump, the prospect of Biden being president for four more years should be enough to compel some kind of serious action now.Here, the frequent analogy to a figure like Ruth Bader Ginsburg doesn’t go quite far enough. Ginsburg’s staying too long in office was a sin against her own liberal principles, which suffered a great setback when a Republican president appointed her replacement. But the decline of a Supreme Court justice is more manageable and less perilous, for the court and for the country, than the decline of a U.S. president.Yes, presidential aides and cabinet members can manage some aspects of the job for a fading chief executive. But they aren’t law clerks drafting opinions on a leisurely timeline. Their boss sits at the heart of a global network of alliances; commands the world’s most powerful military, which includes a vast nuclear deterrent; and is charged with maintaining a Pax Americana that’s currently under threat from an alliance of revisionist powers. The entire global order will be endangered if there is an empty vessel in the Oval Office, a headless superpower in a destabilizing world.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      With Macron and Biden Vulnerable, So Is Europe

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      The U.S. presidential debate and Sunday’s snap election in France have emboldened nationalist forces that could challenge NATO and undo the defense of Ukraine.This month, President Biden, flanked by President Emmanuel Macron of France, stood on the Normandy bluffs to commemorate the young men who clambered ashore 80 years ago into a hail of Nazi gunfire because “they knew beyond any doubt there are things worth fighting and dying for.”Among those things, Mr. Biden said, were freedom, democracy, America and the world, “then, now and always.” It was a moving moment as Mr. Macron spoke of the “bond of blood” between France and America, but just a few weeks later, the ability of either leader to hold the line in defense of their values appears more fragile.The United States and France — pillars of the NATO alliance, of the defense of Ukraine’s freedom against Russia and of the postwar construction of a united Europe — face nationalist forces that could undo those international commitments and pitch the world into uncharted territory.A wobbly, wavering debate performance by Mr. Biden, in which he struggled to counter the dishonest bluster of former President Donald J. Trump, has spread panic among Democrats and raised doubts about whether he should even be on the ticket for the Nov. 5 election.Uncertainty is at a new high in the United States, as well as in a shaken, startled France.The country votes on Sunday in the first round of parliamentary elections called by Mr. Macron to the widespread astonishment of his compatriots. He had no obligation to do so at a time when the far-right National Rally, triumphant in recent European Parliament elections, seems likely to repeat that performance and so perhaps attain the once unthinkable: control of the French prime minister’s office and with it, cabinet seats.Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella of the National Rally in Marseille in March. Mr. Bardella is likely to become prime minister if National Rally wins the election. Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats: Stop Panicking

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      As a former Republican who spent decades pointing out flaws in the Democratic Party, I watch the current Democratic panic over President Biden’s debate performance with a mix of bafflement and nostalgia.It’s baffling that so many Democrats are failing to rally around a wildly successful president after one bad night. But it does remind me of why Republicans defeated Democrats in so many races Republicans should have lost.Donald Trump has won one presidential election. He did so with about 46 percent of the popular vote. (Mitt Romney lost with about 47 percent.) The Republican Party lost its mind and decided that this one victory negated everything we know about politics. But it didn’t.One debate does not change the structure of this presidential campaign. For all the talk of Mr. Biden’s off night, what is lost is that Mr. Trump missed a great opportunity to reset his candidacy and greatly strengthen his position.Mr. Trump lost the popular vote by a margin of seven million and needs new customers. He could have laid out a positive economic plan to appeal to middle-class voters feeling economic pressure. Instead, he celebrated his tax cuts for billionaires.He could have reassured voters who are horrified, in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise, by the stories of young girls who become pregnant by rape and then must endure extremist politicians eager to criminalize what was a constitutional right for two generations. But Mr. Trump bizarrely asserted that a majority pro-abortion-rights country hated Roe v. Wade and celebrated his role in replacing individual choice with the heavy hand of government.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Ghastly vs. the Ghostly

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      He’s being selfish. He’s putting himself ahead of the country. He’s surrounded by opportunistic enablers. He has created a reality distortion field where we’re told not to believe what we’ve plainly seen. His hubris is infuriating. He says he’s doing this for us, but he’s really doing it for himself.I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about the other president.In Washington, people often become what they start out scorning. This has happened to Joe Biden. In his misguided quest for a second term that would end when he’s 86, he has succumbed to behavior redolent of Trump. And he is jeopardizing the democracy he says he wants to save.I got to know Biden in 1987 when he was running for president. He was hailed then as a leading orator of the Democratic Party, even though he could be windy. I knocked him out of that race when I wrote about how he cloaked himself in the life of Neil Kinnock, the British Labour leader who was a soaring speaker, and how he gave speeches that borrowed, probably unwittingly, from Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.I ran into Biden in a Senate stairwell on his way to make a speech dropping out. He was alone, studying his script. We looked at each other in silence — struck by the weight of the moment — then went our separate ways to the same news conference.Biden was a buoyant soul who had been told he should be president since he was elected to the Senate at 29. And he wasn’t going to let the plagiarism scandal, or his pursuant health problems, stop him. He had two aneurysms in 1988 and later said his doctors told him he wouldn’t be alive if his campaign had continued, and he kidded me that I’d saved his life. He also did not let the other tragedies that scarred his life drag him down.I marveled at the fact that Biden forgave me. He told me that it was better that we stay on good terms. He did not get mad, even when I joked that his new hair plugs looked like a field of okra during the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. He called to chastise me, with good humor, but I hid under my desk, afraid to take the call.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Who Might Replace Biden on the Top of the Ticket?

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      President Biden’s stumbling performance in the debate against former President Donald J. Trump has some Democrats raising the possibility of nominating an alternative candidate and mulling over a roster of names. High on the list is, of course, Vice President Kamala Harris, whose status as Mr. Biden’s running mate might make her an easy candidate for delegates to turn to during a difficult moment. But a crop of Democratic governors and other figures are often mentioned, too.A candidate switch would most likely require Mr. Biden to step out of the race, something his campaign says he has no intention of doing. And the risks are real. Some of the highest-profile potential stand-ins listed below have never endured the vetting and road test of a presidential race. There is a long list of candidates who looked great on paper and withered on the campaign trail.“It’s not as easy as it sounds,” said Barbara Boxer, the former senator from California. “Being vetted for president is like no other vetting. We don’t know how these people would do.”Here are a few of the contenders being discussed:Doug Mills/The New York TimesKamala HarrisVice President Harris, a former prosecutor and senator of California, has at times struggled to define her role at Mr. Biden’s side. Initially charged with addressing polarizing and intractable issues like illegal migration and voting rights, she has been viewed by Democratic donors and supporters of Mr. Biden as a potential political liability. Though those concerns have eased, she has been weighed down by low approval ratings that are barely higher than the president’s.Still, Ms. Harris has for months stumped for the president as one of his main campaign surrogates. She has recently become the White House’s lead voice as a defender of abortion rights. In March, she met with abortion providers at a clinic in St. Paul, Minn., in what is believed to be the first visit by a president or vice president to an abortion clinic. And Ms. Harris, the nation’s first Black vice president, has worked to shore up Mr. Biden’s vulnerabilities with Black and young voters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden debería poner fin a su candidatura

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      Varias veces y de manera acertada, el presidente Joe Biden ha dicho que lo que está en juego en las elecciones presidenciales de noviembre es nada menos que el futuro de la democracia estadounidense.Donald Trump ha demostrado ser un peligro significativo para esa democracia, una figura errática e interesada que es indigna de la confianza pública. Ha atentado de manera sistemática contra la integridad de las elecciones. Sus partidarios han descrito públicamente una agenda para 2025 que le daría poder para llevar a cabo sus promesas y amenazas más extremas. Si vuelve a ocupar el cargo, ha prometido ser un presidente diferente, sin las restricciones que imponen los controles de poderes del sistema político de Estados Unidos.Biden ha dicho que es el candidato con más posibilidades de enfrentarse a esta amenaza de tiranía y vencerla. Su argumento se basa en gran medida en el hecho de que derrotó a Trump en 2020. Esa ya no es una justificación suficiente para que Biden sea el candidato demócrata este año.En el debate del jueves, el presidente necesitaba convencer a los estadounidenses de que está a la altura de las exigencias extraordinarias del cargo que busca ocupar por otro periodo. Sin embargo, no se puede esperar que los votantes ignoren lo que fue evidente: Biden no es el hombre que era hace cuatro años.El jueves por la noche, el presidente se presentó como la sombra de un gran servidor público. Batalló por explicar lo que lograría en un segundo mandato. Le costó responder a las provocaciones de Trump. Tuvo dificultad para responsabilizar a Trump por sus mentiras, fracasos y planes escalofriantes. Más de una vez le costó trabajo llegar al final de una frase.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More