Factor out all the boilerplate, bragging and other bull, and what President Biden delivered Wednesday night — in quite possibly his last speech to the American people — was the ghost of an explanation for why he dropped out of his re-election race: the “need to unite my party.”
And “the best way forward was to pass the torch.”
Maybe they showed him poll numbers that finally convinced him he couldn’t win; maybe they drove home just how the donors’ strike made winning impossible; maybe they did threaten him with a 25th Amendment humiliation ousting him from the presidency immediately; maybe it was some other combo of hammers and bribes.
Whatever: They convinced him that the party he’d always strived to please didn’t want him anymore.
Brutal.
Yet he still won’t admit the obvious truth that he can’t possibly serve out a second term; earlier in the day, his press secretary was loyally insisting he could.
Yet his subtle slurring, his mulish self-praise and trope-packed blather made it plain he’ll be lucky to serve as a feeble figurehead ’til January.
He’s a shadow of what he once was, however impressive or not you judge that to be — bereft even of the high-energy cunning that marked the true highlight of his career, his evisceration of Paul Ryan in the 2012 veep debate.
Read the full op-ed over at The New York Post:
Joe Biden tacitly admits he dropped out because his party just didn’t want him anymore https://t.co/q9KjFnWDox pic.twitter.com/YTl4WNn01w
— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) July 25, 2024
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