U.S. President Joe Biden pauses before he addresses the nation from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on July 24, about his decision to drop his Democratic presidential reelection bid.Evan Vucci/Reuters
The silver-haired head of state has begun to lose his faculties; he’s acting erratically and forgetting to whom he’s talking. He has stepped out of the spotlight, but his physician tells him he needs to hand over the reins and stop acting like he’s in control.
The leader reddens and shouts: “I tell – I am not told! I am the verb, sir. I am not the object!”
That was from Alan Bennett’s great historical play The Madness of King George III, about a British leader whose insistence on clinging to power despite his afflictions may have cost him the United States of America. But this week, it suddenly sounded very modern indeed.
When Joe Biden told his country on Sunday that he would step aside as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, he instantly refreshed American politics and focused the country’s attention on his certain replacement on the ticket, Vice-President Kamala Harris. Less noticed was that his act of telling had a sting in its tail: He plans to remain President, in full command until his term of office ends on Jan. 20, 2025.
Joe Biden is not to be the object of American politics – he will remain the verb. And that’s a challenge for the world.
We don’t really know how Mr. Biden will govern during this final eighth of his presidency. His brief speech on Wednesday evening, delivered with some difficulty using a Teleprompter, failed to answer the underlying question: Are the difficulties he has evidenced this year merely in communication and movement – the stuff of campaigning – or part of a more serious cognitive decline that could affect governing and policy? Is he still the deft legislative mechanic who somehow stickhandled world-changing climate, infrastructure and reindustrialization bills through a hostile Congress?
That question is more important for those of us who live outside the United States, since the American actions that affect us – most things involving foreign relations and treaties, trade and war – tend to be the president’s prerogative.
His final half-year will be worrisome for another reason.
It was around the time of George III that the phase “lame duck” entered the English language. In that more agrarian society, the image would have been well understood: the lone duckling waddling off-kilter behind the pack, sure to be picked off by the fangs and claws of something less fragile.
Lame-duck leaders do not tend to fare well; it’s why U.S. presidents in the last months of their second term don’t tend to accomplish much beyond pardoning people. In a recent example, British prime minister Tony Blair announced in 2004 that he would not be running in a fourth election, only to discover that he’d lost influence over politicians within his party and abroad, who no longer feared or sought rewards from him. Big acts of legislation he’d championed suddenly were being defeated by his own party as his own MPs turned on him.
In his Wednesday speech, Mr. Biden pledged to spend his final months in office, among other things, “working to end the war in Gaza.” In doing so, he echoed the last president to step down from candidacy in the midst of running for a second full term, Lyndon B. Johnson, who pledged in 1968 to spend his lame-duck months working to end the Vietnam War.
The circumstances aren’t the same. The U.S. had been a combatant in Vietnam for years at that point, whereas Americans have not been involved in wars recently, beyond donating weapons. Still, it’s worth remembering that LBJ failed to end the war, in part because his negotiating partners knew he had no lasting authority.
The worry today among world leaders, which I heard among international observers of the NATO and G7 summits recently, is not that Mr. Biden has become debilitatingly frail, but that he now works only within a familiar rut – that he is less able to respond to changing circumstances with new ideas and responses.
That one-track thinking, some say, drove his response to the Israel-Hamas war. Failing to notice fully that Benjamin Netanyahu was hated and blamed by his own people and had no serious plan to defeat Hamas and stabilize the region beyond flailing warfare, the President seemed to believe that he was helping Israel by acquiescing to its extreme-right leader. Though he was arguably the only person in the world with the leverage necessary to stop the excesses and atrocities, he instead stuck to the patterns and phrases he knew.
Kamala Harris may be able to win back many of the voters her party has lost over that tone-deaf response. But Mr. Biden, the lame duck stubbornly insisting that he is to be the teller and not the told, no longer has as much capacity to solve the underlying problems.