Presidents and Presidency (US)

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      The Beginning of Biden’s Long Goodbye

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      In a speech from the Oval Office, President Biden said it was time to “pass the torch to a new generation.” But he said nothing about his own age or capacity that led so many Democrats to desert him.He always knew that he would be delivering a speech like this. He just thought, or hoped, that it would be more than four years from now. Yet while it was not technically a farewell address, with six months still to go in office and more presidenting to do, it was the beginning of Joe Biden’s long goodbye.Mr. Biden’s address to the nation from the Oval Office on Wednesday night was all Joe, love him or hate him — the paeans to American exceptionalism, the evocations of family, the selective boasting about his record, the favorite lofty phrases about an “inflection point” and “saving our democracy,” and yes, the soft, raspy old man’s voice that no longer commands the room the way it once did.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.He said it was time to “pass the torch to a new generation,” but said nothing about his own age, health or capacity that led so many Democrats to desert him since the calamitous debate on June 27. He did not describe the journey from supreme confidence that he and he alone could beat former President Donald J. Trump to the conclusion that in fact he could not. He offered no elaboration on how he had finally decided to give up his bid for a second term, but at the same time, he held back any bitterness he may have felt.Instead, it was an opportunity for a reset, to tell his story again on his own terms and recast the narrative as he starts to exit the stage. In his first extended public comments since dropping out, he tried to remind voters who had grown weary or wary of him why most of them had liked him in the first place and maybe, just maybe, to begin to shape his place in history.“My fellow Americans, it’s been the privilege of my life to serve this nation for over 50 years,” he said with pictures of his family visible behind him. “Nowhere else on Earth could a kid with a stutter from modest beginnings in Scranton, Pa., and in Claymont, Del., one day sit behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office as the president of the United States. But here I am.”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 Says It Is Time to Step Aside for a Younger Voice in Oval Office Address

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      President Biden told the American public in an Oval Office address on Wednesday that he had abandoned his re-election campaign because there is “a time and a place for new voices, fresh voices — yes, younger voices.”His words, lasting 11 minutes in all, were the first extensive ones from Mr. Biden since his decision to step aside, and expanded on his initial announcement, delivered in a post on social media on Sunday, that he was dropping out of the race. His tone was wistful and his speech was an early farewell.“It’s been the privilege of my life to serve this nation for over 50 years,” he said.Sitting behind the Resolute Desk and surrounded by photos of his family, Mr. Biden ticked through the accomplishments of his term, ranging from the choice of the first Black woman to be a Supreme Court justice to pulling the country out of a paralyzing pandemic. He expressed gratitude to the American people for allowing a “kid with a stutter” from modest beginnings in Scranton, Pa., to reach the pinnacle of American politics.Just beyond the camera, dozens of aides and several members of his family, including Jill Biden, the first lady, watched as Mr. Biden said he would walk away from the office they had worked to help him reach for decades.“I revere this office,” he said, “but I love my country more.”Ultimately, Mr. Biden said, he concluded that “the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.” The president praised Vice President Kamala Harris — “she’s experienced, she’s tough, she’s capable” — but warned, as he has for years, that Americans faced a choice between preserving democracy and allowing it to backslide.“History is in your hands,” Mr. Biden said. “The power is in your hands. The idea of America lies in your hands. We just have to keep faith, keep the faith, and remember who we are.”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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      Full Transcript of Biden’s Speech on Ending His Run for Re-election

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      “The best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation,” the president said in a rare Oval Office address. And he told voters, “History is in your hands.”President Biden delivered remarks from the Oval Office on Wednesday on his decision to abandon his bid for re-election. The following is a transcript of his speech, as recorded by The New York Times.My fellow Americans, I’m speaking to you tonight from behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. In this sacred space, I’m surrounded by portraits of extraordinary American presidents. Thomas Jefferson wrote the immortal words that guide this nation. George Washington showed us presidents are not kings. Abraham Lincoln implored us to reject malice. Franklin Roosevelt inspired us to reject fear.I revere this office, but I love my country more. It’s been the honor of my life to serve as your president. But in the defense of democracy, which is at stake, I think it’s more important than any title. I draw strength and find joy in working for the American people. But this sacred task of perfecting our union is not about me, it’s about you. Your families, your futures.It’s about we the people. And we can never forget that. And I never have. I’ve made it clear that I believe America is at an inflection point. On those rare moments in history, when the decisions we make now determine our fate of our nation and the world for decades to come, America is going to have to choose between moving forward or backward, between hope and hate, between unity and division.We have to decide: Do we still believe in honesty, decency, respect, freedom, justice and democracy. In this moment, we can see those we disagree with not as enemies but as, I mean, fellow Americans — can we do that? Does character in public life still matter? I believe you know the answer to these questions because I know you the American people, and I know this:We are a great nation because we are a good people. When you elected me to this office, I promised to always level with you, to tell you the truth. And the truth, the sacred cause of this country, is larger than any one of us. Those of us who cherry that cause cherish it so much. The cause of American democracy itself. We must unite to protect it.In recent weeks, it has become clear to me that I need to unite my party in this critical endeavor. I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future, all merited a second term. But nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.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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      I Was a White House Doctor. Presidents Should Have to Take Cognitive Tests.

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      The job of president is physically and mentally demanding. I witnessed this firsthand as a White House physician for three presidents, including as the designated physician to the president for Barack Obama during his first term. My presidential patients often worked 12-hour days seven days a week. The leader of the free world travels constantly, and participates in or leads briefings in which he must retain huge amounts of information.Health scares can happen at any moment. My role as White House physician was to keep the president healthy and performing optimally, and to provide the public with a candid medical assessment of his ability to carry out the duties of his office.I participated in tabletop exercises in the Situation Room to go over how to follow Section 3 of the 25th Amendment, which deals with succession in the event the president is disabled or incapacitated. Typically, the 25th Amendment came into play when a president was going under general anesthesia for a colonoscopy or scheduled surgical procedure.It is widely assumed that the physician to the president will gather and provide pertinent medical information to those contemplating whether the amendment needs to be invoked. This is not stipulated, but most in the medical community agree that the appropriate role for a physician is to offer a medical opinion, based on facts, that is then weighed by the patient — in this case the president — and those around him.The debates around the fitness of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the last several weeks have created new pressure to start having serious conversations about exactly how the White House medical team should evaluate presidents and determine their fitness for duty — cognitively as well as physically. This has been the subject of decades of discussion within the White House medical team as well as with the broader medical community.Many Americans may want the White House medical team to take a more active role in declaring the president fit for duty. Many would probably like to see the same standard apply to candidates running for president as well. For those things to happen, these medical teams will need access to more data about these individuals than they now collect. And perhaps even more important, we should seriously consider the need for an age limit for those running for president, given the high stakes of the office and the realities of cognitive decline with aging.Many cognitive abilities decrease with ageWhile we retain much of our vocabulary as we get older, cognitive abilities such as speed and reasoning tend to decline more rapidly after age 60. More

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      Democratic Elites Were Slow to See What Voters Already Knew

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      President Biden and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agree on this much: It is the elites who are trying to take Biden down, ignoring the sentiments of legions of Democratic voters. But when I started arguing in February that his age would mortally wound his candidacy, it didn’t feel that way to me. I saw the elites propping him up, ignoring the sentiments of legions of Democratic voters.Who’s right?Maybe we both are. In any system, elites are most visible when they are fractured and factions are acting against each other. In July 2023 — before the primaries, before last month’s debate — a Times/Siena poll found that Democratic primary voters, by 50 to 45 percent, preferred that the party nominate someone other than Biden in 2024.But the Democratic Party’s elites were in lock step around Biden. They refused to listen to what their voters were saying. The fact that he was barely campaigning or giving unscripted interviews was rationalized rather than criticized. No major Democrats decided to challenge him for the nomination. Representative Dean Phillips’s effort to draft alternative candidates was rebuffed and his subsequent primary challenge ignored. Some of this reflected confidence in the president. Some of it reflected the consequences of challenging him.The White House and the Democratic Party apparatus it controls are powerful. Congressional Democrats will not get their bills prioritized or their amendments attached if they are too critical of the party leadership. Nonprofit leaders will stop getting their calls returned. Loyal party donors will abandon you if you’re branded a heretic. “I would be crucified by them if I spoke out of line,” an anonymous Democratic state party chair told NBC News early this month. “I know when you get out of line, they all of a sudden have a shift of priorities, and your races, your state is no longer on the map.” That was far truer a year ago, when Biden’s position in the party was unchallenged.These actions, decisions and calculations by Democratic Party elites were neither unusual nor conspiratorial. This is simply how parties work. But it meant that Democratic voters were given neither a real choice of candidates nor a demonstration of Biden’s fitness for the campaign. What they were given instead was signal after signal that every power broker in the party was behind Biden and confident in his ability to win re-election. Who were they to argue? Biden won the primary contest in a landslide.In February, after Biden skipped the Super Bowl interview and flubbed the news conference intended to defend his memory, I published a series of columns and interviews arguing that he should step aside and Democrats should choose a new ticket at the convention. My argument was that his age had become an insuperable problem — visible in every poll and appearance, omnipresent when you spoke to ordinary voters — and the way his team was insulating him from unscripted interviews reflected a recognition of his diminishment. Biden was trailing Donald Trump even then. He was not showing himself capable of the kind of campaign needed to close the gap. And the risk of frailty or illness causing a catastrophe across the long months of the campaign seemed unbearably high.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 Last Time a Former President Was Shot at While Seeking a Comeback

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      One hundred and twelve years ago, Theodore Roosevelt was campaigning to return to the presidency when a gunman opened fire. He gave his speech anyway with a bullet in his chest.Donald J. Trump is not the first former president to survive an assassination attempt while trying to reclaim his old office. More than a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt was shot just before he was scheduled to go onstage at a campaign event — and went ahead to give his speech anyway with a bullet in his chest.Roosevelt’s gritty response to the attack in 1912 proved to be the stuff of legends and helped cement his reputation for toughness. To that point in American history, three other presidents had been killed by assassins, including William McKinley, whose death elevated Roosevelt, then the vice president, to the presidency. But as of then, no current or former president had been shot without dying.Roosevelt, like Mr. Trump, was staging a comeback attempt, running again four years after moving out of the White House. Unlike Mr. Trump, Roosevelt had left office voluntarily, declining to run in 1908 after serving nearly two terms. Instead, he had helped elect his protégé, William Howard Taft. But within four years, the two had a falling out and Roosevelt decided to challenge Taft for the presidency.Although Taft beat him for the Republican nomination at the G.O.P. convention, Roosevelt broke off from his old party to form the Progressive Party, also known as the Bull Moose Party, so that he could compete in the fall contest against Taft and Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic governor of New Jersey.On Oct. 14, 1912, Roosevelt was in Milwaukee, coincidentally the same city where Mr. Trump is scheduled to be nominated this week. As Roosevelt left the Gilpatrick Hotel to head to a nighttime speaking event, a man named John Schrank approached and opened fire with a Colt revolver. Several men tackled Schrank, but Roosevelt stopped the crowd from killing him on the spot.Roosevelt’s bloodstained shirt, photographed after an assassination attempt on Oct. 14, 1912.Harlingue/Roger Viollet,via Getty ImagesWe 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 Fear Safe Blue States Turning Purple as Biden Stays the Course

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      Lingering worries about President Biden’s age could make Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia competitive, party operatives believe.As President Biden insists he will stay in the presidential race, Democrats are growing increasingly alarmed that his presence on the ticket is transforming the political map, turning light-blue states into contested battlegrounds.Down-ballot Democrats, local elected officials and party strategists say Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia — all of which Mr. Biden won comfortably in 2020 — could be in play in November after his miserable debate performance last month.Some polls in these states suggest a tightening race between Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump, with one showing a virtual tie in Virginia, which has not voted for a Republican for president since 2004, and another showing Mr. Trump squeaking ahead in New Hampshire, which has been in the Democratic column since 2000.On Tuesday, the Cook Political Report, a prominent elections forecaster, downgraded New Hampshire and Minnesota from “likely” wins for Mr. Biden to only leaning in his direction. And in a meeting at the White House last week, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico told Mr. Biden that she feared he would lose her state, according to two people briefed on her comments.The shakiness in the fringe battleground states is an alarming sign for Mr. Biden’s hopes in must-win contests that were already expected to be close, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. An expanding battleground map could force his campaign to divert resources away from the traditional swing states, where he has been falling further and further behind.But Mr. Biden has given no indication he is going anywhere, telling reporters at a high-profile news conference on Thursday that “I’m determined I’m running” and pushing back on his poor polling numbers.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 Is Lloyd Doggett? Texas Democrat Calls for Biden to Exit Race

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      Representative Lloyd Doggett, a little-known Texas progressive, on Tuesday became the first Democrat in Congress to call on President Biden to step aside as the party’s nominee after a halting debate performance that has raised major questions about his health, age and mental acuity.In going public with his concerns, Mr. Doggett, who has represented his Austin-based district for close to 30 years, spoke aloud what most other Democrats have only dared to say in private since Thursday’s debate.Mr. Doggett is a rank-and-file congressman with little national profile. But his public statement gave voice to a growing sense of doom and worry among Democrats about whether Mr. Biden can continue as the party’s nominee, and if by doing so he might cost the party not only the White House but also any chance of controlling Congress.“President Biden saved our democracy by delivering us from Trump in 2020,” Mr. Doggett said in the statement. “He must not deliver us to Trump in 2024.”In an interview on Tuesday afternoon, the congressman said he made the decision to break with his party and call for Mr. Biden to take himself out of the race after feeling “alarmed” as he watched the debate with his wife at their Washington home.He was dismayed when Mr. Biden did not even try to debunk many of the falsehoods that former President Donald J. Trump put forward in his answers. He was disconcerted when the president seemed to lose his train of thought and trail off in discussing health care, ending an answer with the words, “we beat Medicare.” And “we were all troubled,” he said, by Mr. Biden’s lack of forceful answers on abortion and reproductive freedom.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