The right swings and misses with absurd calls for Biden to resign

President Joe Biden at a speech in Raleigh on June 28, 2024 (Screengrab from video feed)

The torrent of dramatic political news that’s been inundating our screens in recent days has been jampacked with all manner of comments and commentary – insightful and idiotic, inspiring and insipid, patriotic and pathetically partisan.

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump and killing of a bystander at a Pennsylvania campaign rally even gave rise to a brief millisecond in which the entire nation seemed to find a spit of common ground as it recoiled in unison at the horror of political violence.

But if there has been a single lowest low point among the countless pronouncements emanating from our nation’s political class in these recent hectic days, it had to found in the scripted reaction we heard from Republican politicians and pundits this past Sunday in the hours immediately following Joe Biden’s announcement that he is withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race.

As you may have heard, Biden’s selfless and courageous retirement statement had scarcely made it out onto the internet before scores of Republican politicians – including some from North Carolina – made the preposterous demand that he resign immediately.

North Carolina Congressman Richard Hudson – a man who has loudly stated that the nation’s future should be turned over to a 78-year-old serial liar and convicted felon for whom utterly unhinged statements are an almost daily ritual – said if the president “is mentally unfit to campaign, he is mentally unfit to have the nuclear codes.”

Likewise, Senator Thom Tillis – an occasionally reasonable politician who has at times clashed with Donald Trump and last year claimed the honor of having been censured by the state GOP – issued a similar statement, saying “If President Biden can’t handle the rigors of a campaign, then he can’t handle the rigors of the hardest job in the world for another six months.”

And then there was this remarkable and typically classless statement from the Republican presidential nominee himself:

“Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve – And never was! He only attained the position of President by lies, Fake News, and not leaving his Basement. All those around him, including his Doctor and the Media, knew that he wasn’t capable of being President, and he wasn’t….”

To which all a caring and thinking person can say in response is: “bunk.”

As Biden has demonstrated repeatedly throughout his presidency, the nation has seldom been in better hands than it has been during the last three-and-a-half years or is at the present moment. Thanks to the president’s decades of experience, keen intellect, and dedication to honest public service, he’s put together one of the most stable and effective administrations in modern American history. As nonpartisan historian Jon Meacham wrote persuasively in Monday’s New York Times Biden is “a good man, a patriot and a president who has met challenges all too similar to those Abraham Lincoln faced.”

And this fact is reflected daily in the nation’s remarkable rebound from the disarray and chaos –the failed pandemic response, the economic collapse, the foreign policy humiliations, and the near political coup — that marked the previous administration.

Indeed, Biden’s act of stepping aside and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor is but the latest in a long line of heroic acts in a presidency that has always been marked by a simple idea that escapes so many of his opponents – namely, putting the nation ahead of one’s own personal interests.

And as I argued a few weeks ago, Biden may not move as fast as he once did, nor thrive particularly well in the crazy and totally unique world of an unscripted television debate, but neither of these factors has much of real importance to do with his current job or, frankly, his ability and fitness to serve effectively in a second term.

What’s more, deciding that you no longer want to be president when you’re 86, has nothing to do with whether you can continue to serve effectively at 81.

All that said, one need not have a PhD in political science to understand what’s behind the coordinated attack that the GOP launched against Biden on Sunday.

As North Carolina Democratic Party vice chair, Dr. Kimberly Hardy told me Sunday evening, the attack is born chiefly of two simple realities: 1) the fact that the Republican campaign has long been premised on running against (and manufacturing questions about) Biden’s age; and 2) the lack of plan for pivoting to run against Harris.

Simply put, if the central argument of your campaign is that Joe Biden is too old to be reelected, it’s understandable that you’d want to keep running against him – even when he’s no longer on the ballot.

And so it is that we’re likely to keep hearing these kinds of attacks — at least for a little while until the right-wing media machine cranks up to manufacture new reasons (likely tinged with thinly veiled overtures to racism and misogyny) to smear the vice president.

Gird yourselves.

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