ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos directly asked Joe Biden in a prime-time TV interview about the effort being led by U.S. Sen. Mark Warner to convince the president to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race.
Biden took a not-all-that-veiled shot at Warner in his brief response.
“Mark’s a good man. He also tried to get the nomination,” said Biden, who, like Warner, made an effort at the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2008, both coming up well short in that race, which came down to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
“Mark and I have a different perspective. I respect him,” Biden said.
The gloves are obviously off. Biden insisted in the interview that he’s not dropping out of the 2024 race, though he also, and more strenuously, insisted that he “just had a bad night” at the CNN debate last week that turned the race on its head.
Biden struggled from the outset in the one-on-one with ex-president Donald Trump, declaring at the end of a rambling discourse on healthcare policy that “we finally beat Medicare,” and later turning an answer to a question on women’s reproductive rights into a self-own on border security.
Perhaps worse were the long, blank stares, mouth agape, in the split-screen shots as Trump blustered, and largely lied, his way through the debate.
The performance brought to life concerns about Biden’s age and mental acuity that have lingered since the truncated 2020 campaign, which the Biden campaign largely ran remotely at the height of the COVID pandemic.
Warner, The Washington Post reported on Friday, is trying to arrange a meeting of Democratic senators to persuade Biden to drop out of the race, for the good of the country, a move that Biden, obviously, is going to resist, the good of the country be damned.
The president, at a rally in Wisconsin on Friday, offered a pointed criticism at “some folks” who “don’t seem to care who you voted for” and are “trying to push me out of the race.”
Count Warner among those “some folks,” though he’s far from being the only top Democrat in that group.
Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin told MSNBC that there is a “serious conversation” ongoing at the top levels of the Democratic Party about replacing Biden as the nominee, though he didn’t go anywhere near talking specifics about what that conversation might entail.
A former Democratic National Committee vice chair, Raymond T. Rybak, the former mayor of Minneapolis, has suggested a sort of truncated primary, with a series of candidate forums and a straw poll to engage Democratic voters in the selection process.
Democratic strategist Mychal Wilson told NewsNation that it’s “totally feasible” to replace Biden, but the initial move needs to come from “Biden himself.”
It’s not going to come from Biden himself.
Stephanopoulos confronted the president with his low approval rating, citing a 36 percent job approval rating from a New York Times/Siena poll released earlier this week, but Biden dismissed the figure, saying “that’s not what our polls show.”
Asked, then, by Stephanopoulos how he would feel in January if he continues to dismiss the critics, stays in the race, and loses to Trump, we got this from the president.
“I’ll feel, as long as I gave it my all, and I did as good a job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” Biden said.
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Chris Graham
