On Tuesday night in Chicago, Joe Biden will formally re-enter the political arena, delivering a speech to a disability-rights organization.
The question: Does anyone really want him back?
Biden effectively bowed out of the national political scene on July 21 when, weeks after a disastrous debate performance, he announced he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race.
The president was a political ghost during his last months in the White House. Kamala Harris had little interest in having the unpopular president on the campaign trail. And Biden himself seemed greatly reduced; his already-limited public schedule shrunk to almost nothing.
But, even after Harris’ loss, word came out of Bidenworld that he wasn’t entirely done with politics. His inner circle pushed back against the notion that the entire 2024 loss was his fault. Biden himself met with Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin to offer his help as the party sought to rebuild.
And, slowly but surely, Biden has done events — a model UN appearance in New York City, a stop by a labor union — to make sure people (or at least Democrats) still know he is around and available.
Why? Simple. Biden is entirely focused on his political legacy these days. And he certainly doesn’t want the final chapter in that legacy to be defined by his debate with Trump and the subsequent efforts by Democratic leaders to push him out of the race.
Biden, like all of us, wants to write his own final chapter — one that casts his service (and his presidency) in a better and warmer light.
But, Biden, like all of us, isn’t likely to have it end the way he wants. Read through the coverage of Biden’s speech tonight and you see, everywhere you look, signs that the Democratic party doesn’t really want Biden back.
This, from a CNN piece previewing the speech, is telling: “Asked by CNN about hearing from the former president since January 20, one longtime supporter and donor said only this: ‘No. Thank God.’”
And this quote from Politico, attributed to a person who worked closely with Biden’s campaign, is brutal: “It takes a special level of chutzpah as the man most responsible for reelecting Donald Trump to decide it’s your voice that is missing in this moment. The country would be better served if he rode off into the sunset.”
I suspect things will only get worse for Biden when CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson release their book “Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” on May 20.
The whispers I hear about what’s in the book regarding Biden’s health — and the efforts to keep those facts from the public — are devastating. And no amount of speech-giving or re-emerging will change those facts.
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