Lord Almighty, Joe, Let It Go!

Maureen Dowd

Everyone wants Joe Biden gone. Even the people who don’t want him gone really want him gone. “Everyone’s waiting for Joe,” said one top Democrat. “And he’s sitting at home, stewing and saying, ‘What if? What if? What if?’ We’re doing things the Democratic way. We’re botching it.”

I have many happy memories of Rehoboth Beach. I went there growing up and have Proustian recollections of crispy French fries with vinegar sold on the Boardwalk. But now my gladdening images have been replaced by a maddening one: President Biden hunkered down in his house there, recovering from Covid, resisting talking to anyone who will tell him the truth, hoarsely yelling, “Get off my beach!” at the growing list of Democratic lawmakers and donors trying to warn him that he is pulling down his party and the country.

It makes me sad that Biden doesn’t see what’s inescapable: If he doesn’t walk away gracefully right now, he will likely go down as a pariah and ruin his legacy. The race for the Oval today is between two delusional, selfish, stubborn old guys, and that’s a depressing state of affairs.

As for those D.C. careerists surrounding Biden who a) hid his true condition; b) gaslighted the press for focusing on what they called a nonexistent age issue; c) shielded the president from the truth about his cratering chances of winning; and d) seem to have put their self-interest first? One way or the other, they’ll probably be out of their jobs soon.

Shockingly, even as the Republicans roar out of Milwaukee, vibrating with joy, Biden’s brain trust continues to run a lousy campaign, as though nothing has changed. Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign chair, went on “Morning Joe” Friday to say that the polls aren’t as bad as they are, that Biden is “more committed than ever” to running and that, when 100,000 homes got a knock on the door this past week, 76 percent of the respondents “are with Joe Biden.” Then, as Alex Thompson reported for Axios, Dillon went from cable news to a rah-rah call telling staffers not to pay attention to cable news because “the people in our country are not watching cable news.” On the same day, Kamala Harris suddenly joined a call to reassure donors, but donors are in full flight.

At the convention, I went to a “Policy Fest” held by the Heritage Foundation — the folks devising the extreme Project 2025 — and their vision for America is very creepy and retrogressive. Democrats should be alarmed thinking about Donald Trump with a Republican Senate promoting Judge Aileen Cannon to the Supreme Court.

This is already over. Democrats and journalists have moved on to other questions: Will Biden throw his support to Kamala or ask for an open convention? Would Kamala agree to be on an all-femme ticket with Gretchen Whitmer? Can a candidate other than Kamala play with the pot of gold now designated for Biden? Would the amazing ratings of a gladiatorial Democratic contest and an open convention drive Trump out of his mind? (Yes!!)

Tony Fabrizio, a Trump pollster, told reporters this week that not only does the campaign have an ad blitz about Biden’s debate brain freeze ready to go, but it also has primo oppo on Kamala. “Rest assured,” he said, “we are 100 percent ready.” But Republicans are nervous about a Dem ticket swap. Tom Cotton posted that it would be a “coup.”

Biden has a right to be sniffy about some of the elite Democrats who want him out. Even if Barack Obama stopped messing with his Netflix money and came to Delaware to tell Biden to go, Biden wouldn’t listen. He’s still bitter that Obama pushed him aside for Hillary in 2015, so he doesn’t want to hear from either of them. Obama always seems to be leading Joe off the stage — even at that glossy Hollywood fund-raiser — and Joe resents it. He doesn’t want to have that awful feeling like he had in 2016 when he watched Trump beat Hillary, after he had stepped aside.

Now CNN reports that Biden is “seething” at his old friend Nancy Pelosi, the most respected person in the party, because he thinks she’s coordinating a campaign to force him out. Pelosi’s longtime pal in the California delegation, Zoe Lofgren, put out a letter Friday urging Biden to step aside, and New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who is sure to bring others with him, also joined the chorus.

It’s true that Pelosi has played Madame Web in this crisis, initially trying to create a silky web that would caress Biden out of the race, and only getting tougher once he resisted. She has been sitting with her maps of the political world, working the phones and doing her head counts. She loves Biden — he was more grateful for her help than Obama was and more effusive in his praise — but she loves the House more. She refuses to let the president burn it down for the sake of his ego and make it easy for Trump to slouch back to Washington with messianic, vengeful dreams.

Given that Biden said it would take the Lord Almighty to make him drop out, I have no doubt that Pelosi has been using their shared Catholic faith to guilt-trip the president into understanding the stakes, and what she thinks the Lord Almighty would want. Certainly, she might have said, she doesn’t like Trump claiming, as he did this week, that the Lord Almighty is on his side. Really, what the Democrats need is a thrilling open convention, rather than a coronation. Trump just had one of those, after all.