Why President Biden Shouldn’t Run in 2024
By all accounts, President Biden is poised to announce that he is running for re-election some time this year. Reports from White House press and mainstream news outlets indicate that it is an open secret in the West Wing, and an announcement is only a matter of time. Despite losing the House of Representatives to the Republicans, the president feels confident after a surprisingly good midterm for Democrats in which they (we, I’m a Democrat) retained their majority in the senate and saw improved margins in nearly every state with only Florida and New York shifting right. President Biden is confident and committed to continue serving the American people. I would argue that after more than half a century of service, it is time for Uncle Joe to retire and pass the torch.
Joe Biden has been a fixture of American politics since he was first elected to the senate during the Nixon Administration. He has run for president three times, and the last one, he won. There’s no doubt he has exceptional retail politics skills and understands what it means to endure a long campaign. However, do we really want an 80-year-old, gaffe-prone politician representing the face of our party’s future? House leaders Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Jim Clyburn are roughly the same age as Joe Biden, and this year, they stepped down from their positions allowing younger leaders Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clarke, and Pete Aguilar to step up. My generation and the generation coming after me faces unique and difficult social challenges, and we deserve a seat at the table.
It’s not just his age; over the past two years, Joe Biden has consistently demonstrated a lack of urgency on major social challenges impacting Americans and in several cases has completely dropped the ball. We’ve seen abortion rights move backward with the overturning of Roe met by state legislatures and governors across the country virtually demolishing the right to reproductive care. We’ve seen states launch vile, hateful campaigns to criminalize the existence of transgender Americans and use the LGBTQ+ community as a punching bag. We’ve endured continued gun violence and police violence killing over 40,000 Americans per year. President Biden could have fought to add justices to the Supreme Court, reform the judiciary whole scale, call on the Senate to abolish the filibuster, pressure the hold-outs Manchin and Sinema, and be far more aggressive with the Justice Department in arguing that abortion bans violate the 14th amendment. He could have used his executive authority to close for-profit detention centers, pardon every non-violent drug offender, and cancel $50,000 of student loan debt. He could have appointed progressive board members to the SEC to ban stock buybacks without an act of Congress. He could have punished Amazon for their union-busting by withholding their contracts. He could have fought to include automatic stabilizers in the ARP and made the child tax credit expansion permanent.
There is so much the president could have done and could still do to make progress on building a less cruel, more kind society. One thing that has stuck with me was a quip then-candidate Biden made on the campaign trail during a closed-door fundraiser. He addressed his donors stating “nothing will fundamentally change.” That doesn’t work for worried parents helping their kids identify good hiding places in the event of a school shooting. That doesn’t help the transgender kids across America who are having their essential healthcare stripped away from them. I didn’t expect President Biden to solve every major social problem, but I also believe we can demand more of our leaders. We can demand a president that doesn’t tip-toe around the edges of a broken economy, but instead delivers big, structural change. President Biden should listen to the overwhelming majority of Democrats who do not want him to run for a second term and step down.
If not Biden, who? If you want a Moderate who is less old and out-of-touch, I’d say go for Gretchen Whitmer. She just got re-elected as governor in a purple state, and she’s generally good at politics. As a progressive, I’m looking for candidates with a record of rejecting corporate PAC money and fighting for bold policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, ending cash bail, abolishing ICE, universal childcare, and debt-free higher education. I would love to see one of these politicians run for president: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, Jamaal Bowman, Elizabeth Warren, Ayanna Pressley
