Biden stated the obvious: Putin must not remain in power, free to destroy Ukraine

When you call someone a butcher, because his army has turned the sovereign democratic nation of Ukraine into a hellscape of slaughtered civilians and leveled cities for no reason except hunger for power and control, do you want that butcher to remain in power? No.

So President Joe Biden was stating the obvious Saturday when he said of Russian President Vladimir Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

I found his words bracing and was surprised to see the White House immediately start walking back the apparently spontaneous addition to the closing of Biden’s speech in Warsaw. “The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change,” White House pool reporter Aurélia End of AFP reported, attributing the comment to a White House official. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made the same points Sunday in Jerusalem.

Why walk it back? I wondered. Let people debate what Biden meant and interpret it how they want.

'Pathetic' White House backpedaling

An argument quickly erupted on Twitter and beyond between people enormously relieved that Biden had said what they were thinking, and people who might agree with him but believe it was at best risky and at worst dangerous for him to say such a thing. You want Putin to be thinking about making a deal. Enraging him isn’t the way to encourage that, the thinking goes. Especially when he seems to be shifting his goals and his ground and could be on the verge of … something.

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My heart is with the argument on the other side: Let’s stop saying what we won’t do or can’t do or don’t mean. Let’s say what we really mean and make Putin wonder what we will do. That is what President Ronald Reagan did when he called Russia the evil empire. It’s what President George W. Bush did when he called Iran, Iraq and North Korea "an axis of evil.”

It’s what Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess grandmaster and human rights advocate, has been urging on social media, where he shifted into high gear after Biden’s unscripted cri de coeur. “No free world leader should hesitate to state plainly that the world would be a far better place if Putin were no longer in power in Russia,” he tweeted Saturday.

Among his suggestions: Put “Putin cannot remain in power” on Biden T-shirts, don’t throw Putin any lifelines and if you must walk anything back, simply agree with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov that the Russian people will decide who is in power. Better yet, stop trying to muddle Biden's remark.

“Biden isn't Trump, requiring an English to English translator! No dictator is legitimate. Don't backpedal when you are right and in the right. Don't play diplomatic games with a mass murderer,” Kasparov wrote. “When the President is right, the White House should stick with him instead of fumbling to apologize to a murderous dictator for speaking the truth. It's pathetic.”

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Did Biden mean to say it? Unclear. Did he mean what he said? Of that there is no doubt.

Since mid-March the president has called Putin a war criminal, a murderous dictator and a pure thug. And on Saturday, after Biden had met with Ukrainian refugees at a stadium in Warsaw and before he uttered the sentence that launched thousands of reactions, the White House press office circulated a transcript of this exchange:

Q You're dealing every day with Vladimir Putin. I mean, look at what he's done to these people. What does it make you think?

THE PRESIDENT: He's a butcher. That’s what it makes me think.

Biden is 'out over his skis' once again

A decade ago, President Barack Obama said Biden, then his vice president, had “probably got out a little bit over his skis" when he told NBC’s "Meet The Press" that he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage. Biden apologized to Obama for putting pressure on him, because Obama had not said whether his own opposition had changed.

But Obama soon made his own announcement in support of same-sex marriage. He told ABC's "Good Morning America" that he had already made a decision and would have “preferred to have done this in my own way, on my own terms,” but “all’s well that ends well.” He said Biden’s remark arose from his “generosity of spirit."

More recently, the White House walked back a comment Biden made last year about social media “killing people” with COVID-19 misinformation on their platforms. The Washington Post characterized that as Biden once again getting out “over his skis.”

It’s true, as lawyer George Conway noted on Twitter, that a moral statement is a presumptive statement of policy when it comes from a president. Biden’s Putin ad-lib could be a “bad lapse in discipline that runs risk of extending the scope and duration of the war,” suggests State Department veteran Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

I see Biden's sentence as a beacon of clarity that pierced the Ukraine nightmare. It might not have been presidential language, tweeted retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe and Seventh Army, “but it was something that he needed to say. Putin is a combination of Milosevic, Ceausescu, and – yes – Hitler. It was a message to Europe and Moscow.”

Biden is, no surprise, out over his skis, this time further than he has ever been, on an international stage, and we can't be sure how it will end. But, as his mother would say, God love 'im.

Jill Lawrence is a columnist for USA TODAY and author of "The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock." Follow her on Twitter: @JillDLawrence

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Joe Biden speaks truth on Vladimir Putin. The world needed to hear it.