Name: Biden isn't going anywhere for now | Ian Bremmer | Quick Take
Uploaded: 2024-07-01T20:24:17.000Z
Duration: 13 min 4 s
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The topic everyone is discussing, of course, is what is the state of play in the U.S. election for President Biden's re-election campaign in particular?

Well, what's going to happen, at least for the near term, is that Biden isn't going anywhere.

His team would have to tell him strongly that they feel like he's making a mistake.

And this is something we've seen on a few occasions.

Remember, Biden has been serving at high levels in foreign office for decades as vice president for eight years, in addition to president for almost four, and as senator, including running the Foreign Relations Committee for decades and decades.

And so the people around him, they are very loyal.

They have a lot of experience and they've been on and committed to Team Biden for a very long time.

They absolutely are willing to give him advice and they execute as well as they can on his directives.

But they are very unwilling to challenge him, particularly when he feels strongly about an outcome.

And we've seen this play out on Russia-Ukraine.

Biden was unwilling to talk about moving towards a negotiated settlement as the Ukrainians were doing better and better.

They weren't having the difficult decision because no one was willing to really challenge it.

And then the situation for the Ukrainians started getting worse.

And it was, they'll manage reasonably well the tactical on the day to day.

And you have a strong coalition that the Americans are leading.

But at no point are you making the big sudden change.

And it tends to kick the can on big, controversial potential decisions.

I've seen the same thing in the war in the Middle East.

A lot of people feeling like Biden should have been tougher and stronger against Prime Minister Netanyahu much earlier, especially as he was taking his own wax against Biden.

And so you got incremental decision making, very cautious, very risk averse, very conservative.

Every one of the tactical decisions were pretty well executed.

But willingness to take big bets and risks, much, much less so.

And now we see the same thing playing out on the election.

For the last year, it's been very clear to anyone that has met with Biden, and I've said this certainly publicly, and I've heard it from all sorts of leaders, whether it's CEOs or leaders of the G7 or the G20 or the big multilateral organizations, that Biden is not someone that is capable of strongly leading the country for another four years through 86, the age of 86, too frail, too slow, losing a number of steps since he was running back in 2020.

But at no point was someone around Biden willing to have the tough conversation, and Biden himself wasn't willing to hear it.

And so you kick the can, you kick the can, you continue to manage it until it becomes a bigger problem.

And it is certainly true that the leadership of the Democratic Party and the top leaders of the House and Senate and the top governors, none of them are straying from the party line.

They are rallying around the president and saying, yeah, he had a bad debate, but he can still do this.

But there are a lot of people that certainly matter for the president in terms of the mainstream media, as well as in terms of senior leaders in the former Obama camp that are saying that this guy needs to step down.

And I do think it matters when the paper of record for the center left, The New York Times, has not just their individual columnists, but the editorial board writing that he needs to stand down.

And I think it matters when respected advisers to Obama, like Axelrod Favreau and a number of others are saying, you need to step down.

In terms of the Obama folks, he thinks that they're the ones that gave it to Clinton as an opportunity, when it should have been his, passed him over.

If Obama said that to him personally and strongly, directly, it would be taken differently.

But certainly, Biden and his senior team won't accept a recommendation for them.

And they won't accept a recommendation from the mainstream media.

I mean, if you look at the seven stages of grief, they are through shock, they're through denial, they're roughly in the anger phase, but they're not yet in depression.

And they certainly aren't engaging in bargaining.

So I think we're very far from Biden actually stepping down.

Now, having said that, there's still five months before the election, and that's a long time for an 81-year-old that has bad days.

And the fact that you now do have, for the first time, some damaging information from the Axios piece that said that, you know, he's pretty strong in being able to engage from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., that's an indictment for someone at 81 that would need to govern until he's 86.

And that's the kind of thing that would not have been shared with the media six months ago.

And when you see members of the family and senior friends and formal advisors to Biden blaming the senior team of staffers for not prepping him well during the debate, that, again, we haven't seen that kind of internal animosity.

And if you start to see senior members of the team turning out against, either anonymously or not, Biden sticking around because they think he can't win, that becomes much more dangerous.

It's easy to manage right after the debate when everyone recognizes that he's not prepared to step down.

But as this story continues to play, and yes, they can try to manage him and limit the time that he spends with the public, but this is going to be the focus for all of the media going forward over the coming months.

And of course, it's a very easy thing for the Trump team to run on.

Running against Biden, as opposed to running on Trump's deficiencies, is a much better place for them to be.

We are in a horrible place in terms of the state of this U.S. election.

I'm sure many of you have seen the CBS YouGov poll over the weekend that shows that over 70 percent of registered voters believe that Biden is not cognitively capable to stand and run the country for four years.

They think he should stand down. 50 percent of registered voters believe the same about Trump.

We have never been in an environment where the American people feel so badly about both candidates.

And yes, of course, there is an enthusiasm gap.

And Trump supporters are much more willing to forgive Trump's unfitness or even to paint Trump's unfitness as a positive than team, than the people around Biden.

You're more likely to see a bumper sticker or a cap for Trump among his supporters than for Biden among his supporters.

And in an election where turnout matters, the fact that large numbers of Democrats are now questioning the fitness for office of their own candidate, I think, does make it more likely that Trump is going to win.

I had very, very low confidence going into the debate about what the outcome of the election would be.

I still have low confidence, but it is higher than it was before the debate.

This is a major inflection point in my view.

And it makes it more likely that Trump is going to win.

And it would put more pressure on the Biden team to consider alternatives.

I do believe that if they wanted to go the alternative route, alternatives exist.

First of all, at this stage, given Biden's age and given the way he is likely to appear over the coming five months, I don't think that Kamala Harris is a worse choice, is less likely to win than Biden.

So simply stepping back, continuing the campaign, but Kamala becomes the candidate, I would say at this point, and I wouldn't have said that six months ago, she's as likely to take the election as Biden would be, both in my view, on balance likely to lose.

But I also think that the potential of bringing in somebody else in the convention, and there are a lot of strong candidates out there, Gina Raimondo would be certainly towards the top, especially because she is actively a very trusted part of the Biden cabinet.

Pete Buttigieg outside, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Jared Polis.

That is also, of course, a bigger risk, because here not only are you pushing aside Kamala Harris, which will antagonize a lot of her supporters, and there are many, but also would be putting up someone who does not have a significant track record in national politics.

So many anti-Trump Republicans were all in for DeSantis.

This guy was going to be the golden child for the Republican Party.

And he was an absolute nothing, lightweight, on the national stage and got pasted by Trump.

So I understand that tactically, when you have a team that is oriented towards consensus around Biden, that on any given day, putting your head up and saying, I think it's time for you to go, sir, is not a great strategy.

And of course, that leads to many, many, many, many days of kicking the can until the point when it is a lot harder and the dangers are a lot greater than they were if you had had that conversation, say, a year ago.

Also, keep in mind that when Biden first won and the election in 2020 became President 2021, literally no one around him thought he was going to run again.

So I mean, they did think this is a one-term president.