“Joe Biden must look realistically at the elections. France and the UK show why. If Biden stays and Trump wins, Democrats will regret not thinking more carefully at this time.”
This is what we read in an editorial of the Washington Post which links the situation in which Joe Biden finds himself to that of French President Emmanuel Macron, “humiliated” in the first round of last Sunday’s legislative elections, and Rishi Sunak, British Prime Minister who “will certainly be defeated on Thursday” in the upcoming vote. After the New York Times, another newspaper of absolute importance addresses the president.
“The three Western leaders made big bets, overestimating their political skills and underestimating the protest vote against those in office, and this has backfired in quick succession,” the editorial continues, referring to Macron who “gambled” by calling early elections after the European elections, and Sunak who had “until next year to call an election, but instead chose July 4.”
For his part, Biden’s gamble was to “call for the presidential debate at an earlier date” with his team “imagining that the face-to-face with Donald Trump would give him the opportunity to quell concerns about his age and energy, highlighting the contrast between the two candidates”. Instead, it is well known how last Thursday’s debate went and how it caused alarm and calls for Biden to step back.
The Post editorial notes that the latest polls show that after the debate, the share of registered voters who think Biden “does not have the mental and cognitive health to be president” has risen from 65% to 72%, and 60% think he should be replaced. “To win, Biden would have to convince millions of people who now think he is unfit to be president to vote for him,” it continues. “What is happening in France and the United Kingdom shows that it is not as easy as he thinks. And instead of dealing with this hard truth, the Biden family appears to be blaming the staff.”
And the Washington Post editorial ends with the expression of a certain skepticism of the line that Biden’s campaign and Democratic leaders are adopting: “Biden should give interviews and give conferences, instead he has a light schedule, which does nothing but confirm those who say he is able to function between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. for a job that requires 24-hour attention – it concludes -. If Biden remains and Republicans win the White House and Congress in four months, Democrats will regret having thought more carefully now when they could perhaps still have avoided such a negative outcome”.
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