US President Joe Biden on Wednesday justified his decision not to seek re-election as the expression of a lofty act of generosity and personal sacrifice for the good of his fellow citizens. “I revere this place, but I love my country more. The defense of democracy, which is at stake, is more important than holding any office,” Biden said in a heartfelt address to the nation televised from the Oval Office in which he also defended the achievements of his presidency and set goals for the six months he still has ahead in the White House. “It gives me strength and joy to work for the American people,” he added. “But the sacred task of continuing to perfect our Union cannot be about me. It is about you. About your family. About your future. About ‘We the People.’”
Biden presented his story of overcoming as the expression of the American dream of “a stuttering boy from humble beginnings” who on one of his most difficult nights brought an urgent message: “America will have to choose between moving forward or backward, between hope and hatred, between unity and division.” “History is in your hands,” he said. “The power is in your hands. The idea of America is in your hands. We just have to keep the faith, keep the faith and remember who we are.”
It was just over 10 minutes full of historical references, in which he tried to look in the mirror of Roosevelt and Washington and did not miss the famous definition of America by Benjamin Franklin: “A republic, as long as we know how to maintain it.” If he steps aside, he told his compatriots, he does so precisely with that objective and to unite the country and not because he does not believe himself capable of a second term. “It has been the great privilege of my life to serve this nation for more than 50 years,” he said about his long political career.
It was the president’s first formal intervention since he announced on social media last Sunday that he would not pursue his presidential candidacy and would choose Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor, whom he described as an “experienced, tough and capable” traveling companion.
The speech closed one of the most complicated chapters in Biden’s long political career. The bombshell resignation came at the end of the long weeks that followed his disastrous presidential debate with the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, after which doubts arose about the physical and mental abilities of an 81-year-old man to be re-elected at the polls and carry out what is perhaps the most difficult job in the world for four more years. That June 27 in Atlanta also opened the floodgates for prominent members of his party, old allies, the media and analysts to begin to suggest, first, and then demand, that he reconsider his decision. Finally, it took 24 agonizing days before he surrendered to the evidence.
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“I have decided that the best way forward is to pass the baton to a new generation,” Biden said Wednesday in a serious-sounding prime-time address for which he was accompanied by his family in the Oval Office. “This is the time to let new voices, younger voices, be heard.”
The appeal to “defending democracy” was constant, and could be interpreted again and again as a thinly veiled reference to Trump; the president has been insistently identifying his opponent as an existential threat to the American experiment for a couple of years. Shortly before the presidential speech from the White House, his opponent boasted of having ousted him. “Three days ago we officially defeated the worst president in the history of our country, the corrupt Joe Biden,” said the Republican candidate.
The Democrat worked on the text for the last three days, a dizzying 72 hours in which Harris secured the necessary support to be designated as the presidential candidate amid a wave of enthusiasm and a shower of millions in donations. Biden has attended the fervor that followed his resignation, as if he had the privilege of witnessing his own political funeral, from his beach house in Rehoboth, in his native Delaware. He took refuge there last week after contracting Covid, a disease for which he tested negative on Tuesday. During what is not hard to imagine as one of the toughest weekends of his career, Biden studied the unfavorable polls and finalized his decision, which he kept secret from a small circle, while he wrote the text of his farewell with the help of two of his closest advisers. He did not offer any more details about this entire process on Wednesday.
With his resignation, Biden is giving up on his efforts to seek re-election, but he will fulfill the obligations of the rest of his presidency, a decision that has been criticized by Republicans, who believe that if he is not fit to win an election, he is not fit to continue serving as Commander in Chief for another day.
“Over the next six months, I will focus on doing my job,” Biden promised in the Oval Office. “That means I will continue to lower costs for working families and grow our economy. I will continue to defend our personal liberties and our civil rights, from the right to vote to the right to choose,” he added, referring to abortion.
Biden has been almost everything and for almost as long as possible in Washington: senator, vice president and, finally, as was his childhood dream, president of the United States, a position he reached with 81 million votes at a time of extreme disunity and in the middle of a pandemic. Perhaps none of those assignments was as thankless as the one he is now in. Biden is already a lame duck president, a lame duck who knows his days are numbered, but is still fighting to remain relevant as the world has already turned its page. Not only that, he still has one last push to secure his legacy. On Wednesday, he promised to use that extra time to combat the Pandemic of gun violence, pursue Supreme Court reform, continue working on his initiative to end cancer and contribute to the strength of NATO.
Transcendental scenario
Historically, presidential addresses from the Oval Office mark momentous moments when leaders speak to their fellow Americans in the midst of serious national crises or to make serious announcements. It was the fourth time that Biden chose that solemn setting to address the American people. It says a lot about the extraordinary moment the country is experiencing in this summer of discontent that two of those occasions have occurred in the space of a week and a half: the previous one was on July 14, the day after the attack on Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. The other two times were to talk about the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7 and to praise the approval of a budget agreement between both parties that extended the debt ceiling until January 2025.
In 248 years of American history, four presidencies have ended prematurely by assassination. Another, Richard Nixon’s, fell under the pressure of the Watergate scandal. Lyndon B. Johnson’s, the one immediately before, ended with his own resignation. It is the most direct precedent in recent memory to Biden’s case; Johnson also decided not to run for a second term. He did so harassed by the disastrous Vietnam War, his health problems and a sense of disconnection with a new generation of voters.
He made the decision before Biden. On March 31, 1968, just over seven months before the election, he announced it to his fellow Americans in a 40-minute televised address that they were told would deal with the progress of the war. The bombshell it contained came without warning. Johnson began by recalling “America’s sons on distant battlefields,” referring to the country’s internal turmoil, and saying he had decided to devote himself to “the wonderful duties of the presidency.” He paused, and for a moment tens of millions of people were unsure what to think. Then he added: “I will therefore neither seek nor accept the nomination of my party for another term.”
Those words were followed by some of the most tumultuous months in American political history: the assassinations of Senator Robert Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King, the tumultuous Democratic Convention in Chicago, where delegates gouged out each other’s eyes while war protesters raged outside and riot police were in full force, and finally, Richard Nixon’s resounding victory over Hubert Humphrey at the polls.
The Democrats seem determined to avoid a repeat of that precedent, invoked time and again this year, when another war, Israel’s in Gaza, seriously damaged Biden’s image among young voters and Arab voters. The rapid closing of ranks around Harris, who secured the necessary delegates in just over 24 hours after receiving the president’s immediate endorsement, suggests that the convention this August, which is also being held in Chicago – as history rhymes – will not be as turbulent as that one.
On Thursday, Biden will wake up in the White House in a position he resisted for as long as he could, after giving a speech he never wanted to write. On the first day of the rest of his presidential life, he is scheduled to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before leaving for the weekend at Camp David. It is paradoxical that this is his first task after his historic resignation: a ceasefire in Gaza is one of the most urgent objectives of the six months ahead. And achieving it or not will be key to defining the place that the history of the United States has reserved for the stuttering boy from humble origins who became president.
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