Here’s what Ryan Lizza is reporting:
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term.
It’s certainly true that Biden could alleviate at least some doubts about his age by pledging to serve only one term, but it could hobble his presidency by immediately rendering him as a lame duck. For this reason, there is allegedly debate about the advisability of making a formal announcement even if Biden has no intention of seeking reelection. According to Lizza, Biden thinks he can benefit most by signaling his plans without making any commitments.
While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.
This raises a host of issues. As a strategy for winning the Democratic nomination, I think it cuts both ways. While some may be comfortable supporting Biden knowing that they won’t be betting that he’s fit for the job at the age of eighty-six, which would be his age at the end of a second term, it also means that the Democrats wouldn’t have the advantage of incumbency in the 2024 election. Additionally, it seems to acknowledge that age is a serious factor and consideration for anyone thinking of supporting Biden, and I’m not sure it helps to bolster that impression.
As a general election strategy, I think it might work for Biden both because it would ease concerns about his age and because it would help him run as the guy to fix things rather than the guy who has been obsessed with the presidency since he first ran for the office in 1988.
But there’s another problem, and that’s the importance of honesty. If Biden is serious about not seeking a second term, it’s a bad look to not be willing to come out and forthrightly say this. I also think that it’s a mistake to think there’s a some advantage to not admitting you’re a lame duck president if everyone assumes you are a lame duck president. I believe Biden would want to make people believe he’s going to seek reelection even if it he had no intention of doing so.
I don’t think it’s good for his candidacy to have this speculation out in the open or to intentionally signal that this debate is going on behind the scenes. It will now keep coming up and being an irritant throughout the primaries and the general election (if he wins the nomination), and then throughout the first three years of his presidency (should he be elected). In these circumstances, it would be better to say right now definitively whether or not he wants a second term.
To me, this seems like it would be a colossal mistake. There are like seventy gazillion ways that this could be exploited during the campaign to make choosing him seem like an absolute fucking waste of your vote. So the Party is going to tell me that after having a massive field of wide ranging and diverse Democrats whittled down, the best offering we can give the country during a period in which we are facing what is arguably the most tangible threat to our very existence since maybe the Civil War, is a white male octogenarian who can only be counted on (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) to possibly make it through a single term? And he will then pass the torch to some, as yet undetermined successor, who will be chosen by a Party who could only find it within themselves to offer up Joe Biden as the antidote to Donald Trump just four years prior?
Maybe I just don’t understand all the multi-dimensional chess going on here within the DNC and all the smart politicos within the Party, not to mention all the magic political jujitsu that would have to take place to sell this idea to the country. But I am a middle aged, upper-middle class white guy; supposedly the perfect demographic for Uncle Joe. Yet this whole idea reminds me of one of those flawed designs from my early days in engineering that worked so perfectly on paper, yet when it was actually built was the most amazing, short-sighted clusterfuck I could imagine. And I was simply gobsmacked and embarrassed, after the fact, at how blind I was to the flaws in what I had created.
Never say it, never defend it, never admit it. What are they (and Biden) thinking?
He’s such a bad candidate yet polling consistently gives him a 2-3 point boost.
I’ll be so happy when the most viable candidates aren’t old men yelling at clouds.
The plan is to have it both ways, to get the benefits of a one-term commitment without the constraints of a lame duck term?
These people are not qualified to catch dogs.
Now that Uncle Joe has foolishly let the cat out of the bag, he has no rational choice but to acknowledge reality. But he’s such a clueless pol and rotten campaigner that he likely thinks he can bluff his way through the question.
Every day, another absurd story. Today the covertly-admitted lame duck. Yesterday it was the ham-handed lame-ass performance with the (IA?) guy who simply asked the question Biden’s gonna get a hundred times: what was the deal with Hunter and why was he chosen to sit on a Ukrainian gas giant’s board? “You’re a damn liar! And fat!” Jeesus, this from a guy with 40+ years[!] of senate/executive experience. Apparently it was all wasted on him.
With even Klobuchar and Buttigieg rising in the polls, things are not looking good. Next we’ll see Plutocrat Mike at 8%!
OT. – By announcing “total coordination with White House” today, McConnell just effectively impeached Trump. Or rather Trump just impeached himself, since this was his idea. House impeachment will stand and not be overturned because Senate Dems are crazy to participate in a kangaroo court trial.
Here is what I mean:
https://www.salon.com/2019/12/16/mitch-mcconnell-wants-a-show-trial-but-democrats-dont-have-to-give-him-one/