Thanks to an article in the September 2 issue of The New Yorker, "Life of the Party: The Democrats seem rejuvenated by their new candidate. Why was it so hard to get one?," I learned about how close the Democratic Party came to being stuck with Biden after his disastrous debate, because he and his staff were so adamant about him staying in the presidential race.
Below are excerpts from the article by Andrew Marantz that show the extent to which Biden was dangerously out of touch with reality until Nancy Pelosi and a few other leading Democrats put enough pressure on Biden to snap him out of his fantasy that rank and file Democrats didn't want him to withdraw and he had a good chance of beating Trump.
The following day [after the debate], his staff drove him [Vermont Senator Peter Welch] to various events -- a meet and greet with dairy farmers in Waitsfield, a media conference in Burlington. Whatever the ostensible topic, the only thing that people wanted to talk about was the debate. "It was maybe eighty-twenty, or ninety-ten, in favor of 'Biden cannot be our nominee,'" Welch told me. "And this is in Vermont" -- the state that gave the President his widest margin of victory in 2020.
...Adam Smith, a congressman from Washington State, told me that, the day after the debate, "I called up the White House and went, 'Guys, we all know what has to happen here.' I hung up thinking, He'll do the honorable thing. And instead I watched the palace guard go, 'Nope, fuck off,' and start circling the wagons."
...On a Zoom call with a political action committee associated with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Mike Levin, of California, told Biden directly that the overwhelming majority of his constituents wanted Biden to step aside. Biden responded, "I think I know what I'm doing," and the call ended soon after that.
The following day, on a call between Biden and centrist Democrats in the House, Jason Crow, from Colorado, said that voters were "losing confidence" that Biden could "project strength." Biden responded, "I don't want to hear that crap." Adam Smith, the representative from Washington, told me, "It was really defensive and frankly a bit weird."
Another Democratic representative put it to me even more vividly: "We were all prepared for 'This is so sad, we're going to have to take the car keys away from Grandpa.' We were not prepared for the scenario where you try to take the keys away from Grandpa and Grandpa points a gun at your head."
...The Democratic Convention was scheduled for August, but the D.N.C. [Democratic National Committee], apparently at the urging of the White House, had decided to make the nomination official a month early, via Zoom, like trying to rush a shotgun wedding before anyone could get cold feet.
...At dinner, Welch struck up a conversation with Jared Huffman, of California, and I asked them both whether the Party should make any structural reforms in light of the Biden affair. "No more uncontested primaries," Huffman said.
"I'm not sure it's a systemic thing," Welch said. "We had a good President who got too old. We didn't see it, and then we did. I think it's a one-off."
"I know he wants to be remembered as Cincinnatus, willingly giving up power," Huffman added, referring to the Roman leader who was said to have resigned to become a farmer. "The fact is, he desperately wanted to run out the clock and hang on to power."
Welch asked, "But isn't that what we all want?"
Like most Democrats I'm deeply grateful to Biden that he withdrew from the race and endorsed Kamala Harris. But the warm feelings (and higher approval ratings) Biden now is getting from a citizenry overjoyed to escape a Trump-Biden rerun in 2024 shouldn't lead us to forget that he had to be dragged kicking and screaming, metaphorically, from his reelection bid.
The article says that the main heroine in this vital democracy rescue mission was Nancy Pelosi.
In total, apart from Welch, only three Democratic senators publicly urged Biden to step aside. Neither Schumer nor Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, were seen as major factors in the process. A few people cracked jokes about how the congressional leadership was acting more like the congressional followership. Adam Smith told me that, after a while, “I went, O.K., this just isn’t going to happen.”
But Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House, continued to push, using a combination of private conversations, press leaks, and carefully calibrated public statements.
On July 10th, Pelosi appeared on “Morning Joe,” on MSNBC, setting off a frenzy of Beltway tasseography. “It’s up to the President to decide if he is going to run,” she said, even though Biden had insisted repeatedly that he’d made up his mind. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision.” (“Such a gangster move,” a ranking House committee member told me.)
More recently, when asked on CBS whether she had led a “pressure campaign,” she replied, “I didn’t call one person.” That may be true, but there are other ways to use a phone.
At one point, Welch sent Pelosi a long text message, sharing his fears about Biden’s candidacy, and she promptly sent him a brief but affirmative reply. (Some next-generation Robert Caro may already be at work on a multivolume biography of Pelosi, scrambling after screenshotted texts.) It’s also possible that Pelosi didn’t initiate calls, but that she sometimes picked up when her phone rang.
Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas and the first member of Congress to call on Biden to withdraw, told me that, before he did so, “I had a conversation with Pelosi. . . . It seemed to me that there was a recognition of the severity of the problem.”
On the cover of her new memoir, “The Art of Power,” Pelosi looms over the National Mall in a white pants suit. “She knew how much time she had on the clock, and she kept ratcheting up the pain until the Biden people got the message,” Smith told me. “An absolute master class.”
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