Just How Viable is Erzra Klein's Column About Replacing Joe Biden?

There is fierce internecine warfare savaging a powerful American political party. It could destroy any sense of unity – the vital key to any party’s success.

If you think I’m talking about the GOP, you’d be wrong. The quaint notion that a rump assemblage of anti-Trump Republicans exists is as fanciful as a reverie about “Rockefeller” or “White Shoe” Republicans re-emerging as a GOP power center. Ronald Reagan and his muscular Reaganism engulfed them back in the 1980s. This, in turn, was ravaged and consumed by the Tea Party in 2010 and 2011. Donald Trump’s MAGA shock troops were just a torchlight rally away.

No, I am talking about the ferocious battle among the Democratic cognoscenti. It’s been raging for months now. New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein dynamited it into the public debate with his recent column laying out why President Joe Biden is too old to run in 2024, “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden.”

Klein, after acknowledging how much this president has accomplished, specifies that the problem is not that Biden is too old to govern, it’s that he is too old, too frail, to run. As with so much in today’s politics, perception is reality.

Long before Klein’s column, this issue had been roiling political analysts and Democratic strategists for months. That could be why so many reporters jumped on Special Counsel Robert Hur’s analysis of Biden’s handling of classified material. For Hur featured in what should have been a “just the facts, ma’am” report many asides noting the “elderly” president’s fuzzy memory.

This point, rather than the finding that Biden was cleared of any wrong-doing, became the focus of much follow-up reporting. Indeed, within four days of its release, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal together ran 81 pieces about Hur’s assessment of Biden’s memory, according to Popular Information.

In his column, Klein built on his role as one of today’s preeminent “chin-strokers” – a term once applied to men (usually White) engaged in “serious” thought, pondering weighty matters as they stroke their chin -- or maybe their beard. But the idea Klein riffs on is that Biden must be persuaded by leading Democratic mentioners to step aside, so that the party elite can choose its presidential nominee at a brokered convention. This is just the sort of phantasmagorical idea that might appeal to a gimlet-eyed political theorist like Klein. Practical, experienced reporters who covered politics – like my amazing first boss, Tom Wicker – might have another word for it: crackpot.

Exactly why an open convention is so desirable amid our 24/7 news cycle and gotcha-coverage escapes me. The 1924 Democratic National Convention, for example, took 103 ballots to decide on a nominee. Consider how, say, the 74th ballot would be covered today? Quick, name at least two things John W. Davis was famous for? You can be sure one is not being president.

American voters were so fed-up with back-room deals in smoke-filled rooms jammed with old White men that they devised the primary system, to let sunlight into this process. The chaos inside and outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago made clear why this was crucial.

Yet Klein envisions this prospective tumult as the ideal setting to choose a viable party leader. He runs through a list of promising governors – Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Gavin Newsom of California to cite a few. Not one has a national profile, much less one approaching Biden. Most voters outside their state would not know who they were.

Klein also do-si-dos right past Vice President Kamela Harris, who is next in line. It might be easy for him to write her off. Not so easy for the party. Klein is speaking for a relatively minor component of the modern Democratic Party’s expansively diverse base – over-educated White males. Harris represents a major component of the party bedrock – the large cohort of Black women who, most recently, helped put Biden into office.

Nation columnist Joan Walsh is not so blithe about this matter in her robust takedown of Klein’s column, “Are Democrats Over That Ezra Klein Piece Yet?” Among other things she views Klein’s argument as “unmoored from reality.”

 Surely, Kamala Harris would succeed him, whether in July 2024 or 2026. But no, that’s not the assumption. And that gives the game away: Pundits who think Biden should step aside never say he should hand the reins to Harris. Ever since her presidential campaign ran aground at the end of 2019, she has been denigrated as a terrible politician and an insufficient successor to Biden. She has made her mistakes, but she has also been subject to the racist and sexist scrutiny that explains why we’ve never had a Black female vice president before…

But he does acknowledge Harris as a potential Biden successor, and praises her as having done a better job than most pundits give her credit for. And then he pivots: “Still, it is the party’s job to organize victory. If Harris cannot convince delegates that she has the best shot at victory, she should not and probably would not be chosen,” he writes. “And I don’t think that would rip the party apart.” I can almost reduce my disagreement with Klein to that one sentence. I truly believe, and have often written, that it would indeed rip the party apart. Black women organized to get Biden to choose a Black woman running mate in 2020. Not all of them favored Harris, but you best believe they favor her now.

Walsh knows from practical politics – this is not game theory in play.

Perhaps the strongest Klein rebuttal, however, comes from Josh Marshall, the founder of Talking Points Memo. He is a generation older than Klein, with a great deal more practical experience, and has been writing about this issue for months – seeking to refute the Democratic pipe dream that Biden will step aside. His headline says it all: “No. Ezra Klein is Completely Wrong. Here’s Why.”

Marshall goes for it:

Is early 21st century America really ready for a party nominee literally chosen by a few thousand party insiders and activists? I have real doubts about that. Will the convention not become a forum for litigating highly divisive issues like Gaza, Medicare for All and the broader contest between progressives and establishment-oriented liberals? The last half century of American politics has been based on the idea that the convention is a highly scripted unity launch event. This alternative would mean a free for all, in which the choice between a number of quite promising candidates will be made by a group whose legitimacy will likely be highly suspect. Not good!

Then there’s another issue…. How do we get there? Klein is refreshingly candid about this while somehow not being remotely realistic about how wildly improbable it is. You do it by mounting a public campaign to convince the people in Biden’s inner circle — Mike Donilon, Anita Dunn, Steve Ricchetti, maybe Barack Obama and whoever else — to convince Biden to step aside. That’s almost word for word the plan. Let’s drill down on what that means. Your plan is to convince the people who are pretty much by definition the most loyal to and invested in Biden — more than anyone in the entire political world — to abandon the plan they’re already two-thirds of their way through and convince Biden to step aside. … As of today, the right-leaning RCP Average shows Biden 1.1 points behind Donald Trump. Are you really going to point to that and convince them that it’s hopeless? That to me is not remotely a serious plan. It’s not a serious anything.

…In life we constantly need to make choices on the basis of available options. Often they are imperfect or even bad options. The real options are the ones that have some shot at success. That’s life. Klein’s argument really amounts to a highly pessimistic but not unreasonable analysis of the present situation which he resolves with what amounts to a deus ex machina plot twist. That’s not a plan. It’s a recipe for paralysis.

I think the Democratic Party has thought — or is in the process of thinking — about this, is addressing it, not ignoring it, pick your vague verb. In addition to many strengths, including incumbency, Biden has a big campaign liability: his age. Democrats have decided that even with this liability he’s probably the best shot to defeat Donald Trump. And even if he’s not, there’s no viable path to switching to anyone else. Accentuate the positive, back burner the negatives, and run the campaign.

It just might be that the best stage direction for the Democrats right now was said by a legendary theatrical director – some attribute it to George Abbott, some Martin Gabel – who commanded: “Don’t just do something, stand there.”

With so many Republicans in lockstep behind Donald Trump, blowing up the Democratic Party’s presidential slate eight months before the election sounds like a sure prescription for disaster. And this election is too important to take these sorts of odds.