Biden’s Oval Office address now hands debate over democracy to Harris

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

(CNN) — President Joe Biden saved his most powerful argument against Donald Trump for the moment he explained to the nation why he was no longer the person to make it.

In his primetime Oval Office address on Wednesday, Biden ceded the political stage to Kamala Harris, ushering in an unusual period heading into the election where the vice president, not the president, will lead their party.

Apart from Biden’s announcement on Sunday not to seek reelection, after days of Democratic Party turmoil, the speech was the most critical moment in his attempt to pass power to Harris. The new presumptive Democratic nominee must now work quickly to carve her own political identity and to make a case for her own presidency — a task in which she must create a vision, program and aura that is distinct from Biden’s and his political liabilities.

This reversal of power dynamics requires Biden to swallow his own aspirations, may at times compromise his dignity, and for Harris, at some point — perhaps as soon as this week over Gaza — to break from her boss for her own political good.

The president explained his decision to end his bid for reelection after weeks of humiliating public debate over his age and mental cognition as instead motivated by a desire to pass the torch to a new generation of leadership at a time of unmatched peril. “I revere this office, but I love my country more. It’s been the honor of my life to serve as your president,” Biden said. “But … the defense of democracy, which is a stake, I think (is) more important than any title,” Biden said. “Nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.”

What Biden tried to do

Biden’s speech, which will be studied for generations, was direct but thematically dense and intended to address multiple goals.

It was a valediction for a political career that has spanned half a century, that he decided, under pressure, to end — even if he would have preferred not to. Biden was seeking to preserve the viability of what is left of a presidency that has suddenly plunged into lame duck status and to dampen Republican calls for his immediate resignation as president. It was a warm endorsement of his preferred successor Harris and an attempt to weave for her a thesis about the successes of his term to present to voters. It was also a moment of political indulgence as Biden took credit for his achievements he thinks he’s been denied in the cacophony of the campaign trail.

But most importantly, Biden’s speech, his allusions to history, his stylization of his decision to step aside as a service to the nation, and his detailed definition of what America means, represented a brutal political indictment of Trump.

Biden opened his speech behind the Resolute Desk of the Oval Office referring to great presidents in the pantheon and how their lives and actions reflected the character of the nation they built and led.

“Thomas Jefferson wrote the immortal words that guide this nation. George Washington showed us presidents are not kings; Abraham Lincoln, who implored us to reject malice; Franklin Roosevelt, who inspired us to reject fear,” Biden said. His implication from each historical example was clear. He sees Trump, the Republican nominee and an ex-president seeking to dedicate a new term to “retribution,” as the antithesis of all these values and is therefore the most un-American president to ever hold or seek the office.

Biden was doing what presidents often do at a time of crisis, reaching into the national mythology to convince Americans to honor the foundational principles of the country built up through decades of words and action. In case anyone had missed the point, he returned to his historic narrative at the end of the speech, quoting founder Benjamin Franklin’s maxim: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Biden added: “Whether we keep our republic is now in your hands,” assigning to voters the task of what he regards as a fight to save democracy against Trump’s perceived threat, which he now won’t be able to do himself in November’s election.

The president also presented his selflessness in ending a reelection campaign and bid to win a second term all president’s cherish as a direct comparison to what he sees as the self-serving corruption of Trump. “America’s going to have to choose between moving forward or backward, between hope and hate, between unity and division. We have to decide, do we still believe in honesty, decency, respect, freedom, justice and democracy. … Does character in public life still matter?”

The unspoken implication of Biden’s pleading was the question of whether the nation that he thinks he recognizes still exists. After all, millions of Americans believe Trump’s false claims that he won the last election and was cheated out of it and that his multiple legal problems caused by his assault on the rule of law amount to a tyrannical bid by Biden’s government to persecute him. And many voters do not recognize the picture of a strong economy that the president painted in his speech. Daily reminders of high prices at grocery stores and struggles to get mortgages or pay rent because of elevated interest rates often create a more immediate sense of crisis for people than the more elusive and abstract concept of a democracy in peril.

So while Biden warned that the entire nature of the American experiment was in question during this election, there’s the half of the country that views the Democratic Party as a threat to their perception of what makes the country great and likely found the speech highly politicized.

A debate do-over

Biden’s words, in the storied surroundings of the Oval Office, cloaked in the familiar and scripted theatrics of a national address, allowed him to make the case against Trump and for his own presidency that he had failed so disastrously to put forward before an audience of 50 million people at the CNN debate in Atlanta a month ago.

The moment when any leader publicly recognizes that their time is up is always poignant. In Biden’s case, it is even more so since he’s not just confronting the limits of waning political appeal but the ravages of advancing age.

Biden appeared stronger than at the debate. But a few stumbles, his rather stiff manner and occasionally raspy voice showed why many Americans didn’t believe he could be president until he is 86. In that sense, Wednesday’s broadcast amounted to a moving recitation of why the president thinks he deserves a second term but was also a demonstration of why he might not have won one.

With that in mind, Biden set himself up as a leader returning power to the people in a quintessentially American manner, implicitly referencing Washington’s farewell address after the aging and weary first president decided not to seek a third term by saying, “Kings and dictators do not rule. The people do. History is in your hands, the power is in your hands, the idea of America lies in your hands.”

The elegiac nature of his address, and his attempt to summon national greatness, also recalled the spirit of President Ronald Reagan, a leader who had risen to the heights and reached a deeper understanding of the character of his nation and brought that perspective to his farewell address in 1989. Soon after he left office, he entered a retirement clouded by a slide into Alzheimer’s disease.

“As long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours,” Reagan said, foreshadowing Biden’s remark on Wednesday, “You just have to keep faith … remember who we are. We’re the United States of America, and there’s simply nothing, nothing beyond our capacity, when we do it together,” Biden said.

One of the most significant implications of Biden’s decision is that he’s now putting his entire political legacy in someone else’s hands. If Harris fails to win the election, everything Biden achieved — and much that also remains from Barack Obama’s presidency — could be at risk in a hardline new era of Trumpist rule.

And if Harris is unable to complete the most exacting and compressed task handed to any presumptive presidential nominee in recent times, the president will surely attract criticism for waiting so long to pull out of the race, putting his personal ambition for another term over his party’s interests for months.

His reputation in history is therefore at stake. But if Harris prevails over Trump, Biden’s actions and thinking spelled out in Wednesday’s address will be more likely to be remembered in his own terms — as a selfless political move motivated by deep patriotism.

Engineering his exit and again blocking Trump from power would be remembered as the finest moment of his 50 years in Washington. His political farewell would be remembered much like the character in Shakespeare’s Macbeth who acted with dignity and humility at his execution and of whom it was said: “Nothing in his life became him, like the leaving it.”

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