Week Two from the Campaign Trail: Why Democrats Need to Drop Joe Biden

or How Biden can have his Bogart moment

In the film Casablanca, right and wrong are not easily distinguished. It’s a stark and amoral landscape, one filled with loose and desperate and unscrupulous characters. Good and evil coexist in Casablanca, bleeding into one another, wrestling with one another, masquerading as one another. In the heart of the Moroccan city, in its bleak and squalid center, stands Rick’s Café, a boozy nightclub operated by an American expat. His name is Rick, and he is played by Humphrey Bogart, and he is content to watch the world go to pieces.

World War 2 is underway, and Casablanca is infested with Nazis. Rick is ostensibly jaded. He insists that he only looks out for himself and his own interests and is indifferent to the outcome of the war. Then one night a woman named Ilsa, played by the enchanting Ingrid Bergman, walks into the café and Rick’s hard-boiled pose cracks like glass.

Ilsa and Rick, it turns out, share a romantic past. But when Ilsa wanders into Rick’s café, she isn’t alone. She is accompanied by her husband, Victor Laslow. A prominent member of the Czechoslovak resistance, Laslow and his confederates plot against the Nazis and hope to someday be rid of their rule.

When we are introduced to them, Ilsa and Victor Laslow are desperately trying to escape from Morocco. And the Nazis are desperately trying to capture Laslow, and by doing so, hopefully mete out a heavy blow to the resistance movement.

The film culminates in a difficult choice for Rick. By a curious chain of events, Rick has come into possession of letters of transit, by means of which Ilsa and Victor could leave Casablanca and travel freely in Europe. But now that they have reconnected, Rick and Ilsa have confessed to each other that their love has never abated. Ilsa wants to stay with Rick as long as Victor can escape.

In the end, Rick realizes that Ilsa must go with Victor because Victor draws strength from Ilsa's love, and Ilsa is therefore indispensable to Victor’s work. The choice that confronts Rick is this—hanging on to the woman he loves and sapping the resistance movement of a source of its vital strength, or letting the love of his life go and in doing so help the resistance movement. The choice can be reframed in even more vivid terms: choosing himself or choosing humanity.

Rick makes the right decision. He chooses the resistance. He chooses humanity. When Rick announces his decision to Ilsa, which naturally occurs on the tarmac when the Nazis are moments away from capturing them, Rick tells her, ““Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

Prodded on by Rick, Ilsa joins her husband on the plane and they fly away to neutral Portugal and not a moment too soon because the Nazis swarm the tarmac just as they lift off. 

Victor Laslow eludes the Nazis’ capture. He will live to fight another day in the resistance. His work will continue to be strong because he has Ilsa by his side, whose love underpins his underground activities. And it’s all because of Rick and his sacrifice.

Joe Biden has run for president three times. The first time he ran was in 1988. That campaign ended in controversy, after it was revealed that Biden had been cribbing his speeches from leaders like JFK and RFK. In 2008, Biden ran again, but his abortive campaign was over quickly, and he became Obama’s VP. Being elected president in 2020 crowned a dream that was decades in the making. That Biden has always wanted to be president is indisputable—his three separate bids all but confirm his ambition.

Last week, Biden resurrected dead foreign leaders. Twice. The first time occurred last Sunday at a campaign rally in Las Vegas, where he confounded the current French president, Emmanuel Macron, with former French President Francois Mitterand.

Biden said, “Right after I was elected, I went to what they call a G7 meeting, all the NATO leaders. And it was in the South of England. And I sat down, and I said, ‘America is back.’ And Mitterrand, from Germany—I mean, from France—looked at me and said, ‘How long you back for.’”

Francois Mitterand was president from 1981 to 1995. He died in 1996.

Biden’s team did its best to put out this fire. But no sooner had they managed this small crisis than Biden, speaking at a fundraiser in New York City on Wednesday, said, “And then Helmut Kohl turned to me and said, ‘What would you say, Mr. President, if you picked up the London Times and learned that 1,000 people had broken down the doors of the British Parliament, killed some bobbies on the way in, to deny the prime minister from taking office?”

The comments were in reference to a conversation Biden had had with foreign leaders at the G7 summit after he was elected. Biden had confused former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was at the event, with Kohl, who was chancellor from 1982 to 1998. Helmut Kohl died in 2017.

One could almost sense the anxiety within the White House. At a press conference on Thursday afternoon, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre began by remarking, “It smells like a chimney, a fireplace.”

This turned out to be a prescient statement because there was indeed another fire that they would soon have to try to put out. It wouldn’t be a small fire this time. It would be a conflagration, and the conflagration came later that same day in the form of the special counsel’s colossal 388-page report.

Although special counsel Robert Hur exonerated President Biden of criminal wrongdoing and highlighted the important differences between Biden’s and Trump’s cases—chiefly that Biden cooperated with investigators while Trump was recalcitrant and uncooperative and obstructed justice “by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then lie about it”—the report was damning.

And it wasn’t damning because the special counsel felt that there was evidence that Biden willfully retained classified material. It wasn’t damning because Biden allegedly shared classified information with his ghostwriter on three different occasions, or because he had personal notebooks that were crammed full of top-secret and sensitive information recorded during meetings in the White House Situation Room and during President Obama’s intelligence briefings. And it wasn’t damning because there were classified documents about Afghanistan in a beat-up box with ripped corners in his garage, the possession of which box Biden might have known about since 2017.

The report was damning because it contained remarks that touched upon Biden’s age. In outlining the reasons for why they would not be seeking charges, special counsel Hur said, “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

This wasn’t the only comment that referenced Biden’s cognitive state. The report also said that Biden was a person with “diminished faculties in advancing age,” and it observed that Biden’s memory was “significantly limited” in his interviews with his ghostwriter and the special counsel’s office.

But Biden’s memory in his interview with the special counsel was “worse.” Over the course of the interview, Biden had trouble recalling when he was vice president, the report alleging that Biden couldn’t remember when his term began or ended. The report also alleges that Biden’s memory was “hazy” when discussing Afghanistan, a topic which was “once so important to him,” as the counsel put it. But the most troubling allegation, the one that Biden contested the most vehemently, was the allegation that he couldn’t remember “within several years” when his son Beau died.

The report’s release shocked the country. And it shocked the Biden administration as well. A media maelstrom ensued. Many Republicans decried the report because it didn’t include charges against Biden. Trump said it was evidence that there is a two-tiered system of justice in our country. But for all their histrionic fury over the lack of charges, congressional Republicans were doubtless pleased with Hur’s portrait of Biden, and they had no problem citing the report as evidence of Biden’s mental decline.

Democrats blindly and madly railed against the report. Because Robert Hur is a Republican, they called the special counsel’s report a partisan hit-piece. They regarded it as a piece of tendentious swill. At a press event, Vice President Kamala Harris took the bait and called the report “politically motivated,” a statement that is baldly hypocritical.

Democrats seem to be forgetting that Biden’s appointed attorney general, Merrick Garland, deemed Robert Hur a competent and honest enough person to undertake the investigation. If Garland felt that Hur could be compromised by his politics, he presumably never would have appointed Hur as special counsel in the first place.

In any event, I think it would be prudent to wait and see if the DOJ will release the transcript or the audio recording of Biden’s interview with the special counsel. Until they do so, we shouldn’t be rash and cast aspersions and impugn the character of the special counsel.

After the report’s release, Biden scheduled a last-minute press conference. When he spoke to reporters from the Diplomatic Reception room Thursday night, Biden was exasperated. His temper, understandably, was hair-trigger. There was a salvo of questions about his memory and his age.

At one point, a reporter remarked, “American people have been watching, and they have expressed concerns about your age.”

Biden snapped, “That is your judgment. That is your judgment.”

The reporter: “This is according to public polling.”

Biden: “That is the judgment…of the press.”

What worries me about this interaction is its Trumpian character. It’s a Trump move, his signature move, to lay his ills at the media’s door. It’s a Trump move to say that the media is distorting reality and pushing a narrative.

And this isn’t an isolated incident. A few weeks ago, when asked by a reporter why his approval rating was so low, Biden quipped that it was because of the press. 

Now this doesn’t come close to Trump’s adversarial relationship with the press, which isn’t really a relationship at all. Or if it is a relationship, it’s a relationship between two unstable lovers who pretend to loathe one another but whose incessant mentioning of the other betrays a deep and unfathomable and unhealthy “love.” Trump’s relationship with the media is a much more tempestuous affair.

Biden’s press conference ended with another gaffe. He called Egyptian President El-Sisi the president of Mexico, which, in itself, would be a fairly innocent mistake, but taken in the context of the special counsel’s report, the findings of which questioned Biden’s memory, Biden’s gaffe seemed to corroborate the report and to corroborate the public’s perception of Biden.

Eric Holder, the attorney general under Obama, issued a scathing response to the special counsel’s report. Holder’s response was a boon to the beleaguered Biden team. In his response, Holder wrote that Hur’s report contained “way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with longstanding DOJ traditions.”

The Biden administration would cite Holder as one of the many experts who took issue with the special counsel’s report. They would lean on Holder, and they would pilfer his statement for language, particularly the word “gratuitous.”

At a press conference the next day, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office Ian Sams prepared for battle. They girded their loins and stepped up to the podium.

Ian Sams spoke of a “very pressurized” political environment in which it was impossible to publish a report without charges. He intimated that it was because of this “very pressurized” environment that Hur felt it was necessary to remark on Biden’s memory and age.

Hur’s report would also mark the first time a special counsel’s probe did not result in any indictments, and Sams felt that this fact could be another possible motive for Hur’s comments.

While Sams didn’t explicitly call the report “politically motivated,” he did say that he had “nothing to object to” Harris’s characterization. He preferred to call the memory-related remarks “inaccurate” and “wrong” and, using Attorney General Eric Holder’s word, “gratuitous.”

Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre then took Sams’s place behind the podium and did her best to handle the barrage of questions.

Did she think the special counsel was lying in his comments about Biden’s memory?

Jean-Pierre replied that the comments were “gratuitous.”

In an unusual but highly cunning defense of the president’s confusing dead with living leaders, Jean-Pierre quoted a writer at the Atlantic as saying, “Biden has gaffed his entire career, his entire career.” You know you’re in some deep shit when you justify an error by saying you have a history of making such errors.

She was also asked if Biden understood that his age was a point of concern for voters, to which Jean-Pierre answered in the affirmative and said that Biden “understands.”

She kept repeating that Biden jokes about his age, that he makes droll remarks, saying things like how he is friends with “Jimmy Madison.” But this seemed like a way to deflect further inquiries, to preempt additional questions on the subject of age. If Biden jokes about it, so the logic goes, then there’s no issue.

The Biden team’s other method of deflection is to bring up the president’s accomplishments. This is a smart and slippery tactic, one that temporarily stuns the interrogator, making them forget the question they initially asked.

When cornered on the report’s comments about Biden’s memory, Jean-Pierre, after first saying the comments were not based in “reality,” responded that “what matters is…the president in the last three years has delivered on the economy, has delivered on healthcare, has turned the country around after the last president left us with an economy that was in a tailspin.”

President Biden is himself a practitioner of this diversion tactic. He used it at his press conference on Thursday, when a reporter asked him about his memory: “Now look, my memory is fine. Take a look at what I’ve done since I’ve become president.”

Biden can blame the media for the public’s perception of him all he wants. And liberal commentators can tar and feather the special counsel. They can call him a political operative. They can dismiss his report as being politically motivated. But what liberal commentators can’t dismiss is the recent results of an ABC/Ipsos poll that finds that 86% of Americans think Biden is too old to serve another term, and that includes 73% of Democrats and 91% of Independents.

What they can’t dismiss is that Biden is 81 years old. What they can’t dismiss is that, if reelected, he will be 86 when he finishes his second term.

When Press Secretary Jean-Pierre said, at another press conference, “Hur is…obviously a Republican,” she missed the point. The left is missing the point. And they are laying themselves open to criticisms of politicking, of sinking to the same petty partisanship that plagues the Republican party.

Many people perceive Biden as too old and too slow to be president.  And Biden and his team have done nothing to disabuse people of this perception. Biden has done 33 press conferences. At this same point in their presidencies, Obama had done 66 and Trump had done 52.

Biden elected not to participate in the time-honored tradition of a pre-Super Bowl interview. It appears like he’s hiding, which might not be the case, but in the highly allegorical world of the news, where an action as perfunctory and banal as a handshake can be scrutinized for meaning, where every headline is a part of a larger puzzle, Biden’s small number of press conferences seems to suggest something—a fear of the press.

Meanwhile Trump’s in the ascendancy. He swept the caucus in Nevada. In a way, Trump won the state’s primary, too, even though he wasn’t on the ballot (candidates could choose either the party-run caucus or the state-run primary).

Haley participated in the primary, and although she technically won, she received the second most votes. The “none of these candidates” option, also available on the ballot, received the most votes.

Trump’s leading Biden in the polls. And Trump’s saying things about NATO that aren’t so much reckless as they are downright traitorous. Even placed in their broader context—Trump complaining about the member states not paying their fair share—Trump’s comments on NATO are unforgivable.

At a rally, Trump said that if a member state was attacked by Russia, he wouldn’t defend them if they weren’t paying their fair share. Then Trump said, “In fact, I would encourage them (Russia) to do whatever the hell they want.”

You can call this a negotiation tactic. You can call this bluster. I call it treachery.

At the beginning of his interview with Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin removed his watch. This was an almost symbolic act because for the next hour or so, time stopped as Putin glided over thousands of years of history, and even if that history was distorted and primped to Putin’s preference, his performance was remarkable and harrowing. Putin could reference at will the United States’ GDP and other such statistics.

If there’s something I agree with Trump on, it’s that Putin is “very smart, very sharp.” And Putin is in league with Xi Jinping, who is also “very smart.” These are formidable adversaries. They will not rest until the global order is rewritten, until America is dethroned. And where is America? It’s missing in action. Republican congressmen are in thrall to Trump. They are emasculated, nothing but a horde of eunuchs who squabble, create dumb committees, tank border deals, and reject military aid to Ukraine. Meanwhile the left is doubling down on its support for Joe Biden, a melting-ice-cream-cone of a candidate. And why?

At his emergency press conference, Biden was asked by a reporter, “Mr. President, in December, you told me that you believe there are many other Democrats who could defeat Donald Trump. So why does it have to be you now?”

Biden answered, “Because I’m the most qualified person in this country to be President of the United States and [to] finish the job I started.”

That’s just not true. Biden’s isn’t running to “finish the job” or to save democracy or for any other reason. He is running because he wants to be president. He is running because of his ambition. There are plenty of Democrats who could beat Trump and win. There’s the very real—and getting realer—possibility that Biden will lose in a rematch against Trump. How will people remember Biden if he loses to Trump? How will Americans view his legacy?

Heroism demands sacrifice. It demands giving up something close to your heart. In Casablanca, Rick lets Ilsa go not because it’s easy, but because it is the noble thing to do.

Biden needs to take his cue from Rick and give up his reelection campaign. If he did so, he would go down as a man who sacrificed personal ambition for the greater good. He would go down as a hero. Because ultimately being president doesn’t “amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”