Kicking While He's Down

 Ever since the 2024 election, I've found myself taking Joe Biden's side in every Democratic intra-party fight. Which surprises me—since I wasn't exactly a fan of his during his presidency. In fact, I was pretty relentlessly critical. But for whatever reason, every attack line that has been tried out on him since the November 2024 loss has just struck me as so much balderdash. 

I was never able to get excited about Biden's various pardons of family members and high-level Democrats, to shield them from the risk of retaliatory prosecution. All those who criticized this move at the time should look at what Trump has done to the Justice Department in just a few brief months in office—and tell me honestly if they still believe Biden made the wrong choice. 

The controversy Jake Tapper stirred up with his book likewise struck me as bogus. There was no "cover-up" of Biden's age. People close to him wrestled with the same questions we all did about his competence. They even scheduled an unusually early debate to test whether he was up to the challenge of the campaign. When he failed the test, party leadership urged him to step down. 

Of course, Biden at first refused to go. But after a couple of weeks—he did. Then we ran an entirely different candidate, and lost. Biden's insistence since the election that he might have still won, if we had left him on the ticket, is at least a colorable argument. Who knows? It's not like we had any more success ultimately with Harris, so who's to say he's wrong? 

All those who are still crying that Biden lost us the election should recall that he was not in fact on the ballot in November. Stepping down cannot have been easy for a career politician—but he did it, because the nation and his party asked it of him. That's as much if not more than we could have asked. And we still lost—on our theory that Harris would have been the better choice. 

"But he should have left the race earlier so we could have had a proper primary," people say. Anyone thinking along those lines is forgetting what the Democratic Party actually looked like in late 2023 and early 2024, when such a thing could have taken place. The entire race would have been dominated by one and only one bitter and irreconcilable intra-party wedge issue: Gaza. 

So, time and again, since the election defeat, I find myself arguing Biden's side. I even took a certain amount of guilty pleasure from reading yesterday about how Hunter Biden had recently laid into party apparatchiks for forcing his father off the ticket. Sure, he shouldn't have used profanities—but some of his blows on the smug ranks of the "Pod Save America" bros certainly landed. 

Yes, I know—the Correct Take on Hunter and the other Bidens is that they have become a paranoid and insular family, obsessed with a narrative of betrayal, who refuse to take responsibility for their own role in the 2024 defeat. But I'm not really feeling it, guys. The people putting all the blame on Biden have never presented a convincing counter-factual as to how we could have won by other means. 

I worry at times that my post-election support for Biden has been so uniform that I've become a sort of apologist. Plainly, the people who criticize him—Ezra Klein, e.g.—see themselves as more even-handed. They devote most of their time (rightly) to condemning Trump—but, see?—they also reserve a bit of their fire for the missteps of Democratic leadership. And isn't that only fair? 

But again, I say, it's not like I was a Biden stooge when he was in office. In fact, I was one of his bitterest critics when it became clear he would not rush to restore asylum. Every media piece I wrote for four years was headlined something like "Biden has betrayed us by keeping this or that Trump-era border policy in place" (except punchier than that, I promise). So, no; I was no Biden apologist. 

It's only now that he's lost and is out of power that I find myself taking his side on everything. Which may sound absurd—I reserved my help for him until he no longer needed it and could not possibly get any use out of it. But on the other hand, I say that this is the only path of honor. You criticize a politician when they're in power—but you don't gratuitously kick them once they're down. 

I recall that in one of Aristophanes's authorial self-insertions in his plays (I'm telling you—here, at the dawn of literature, the master of Greek comedy had already invented all the techniques of postmodernism!): the playwright says—of a contemporary Athenian politician: 

[...] It was I
who struck a blow at Cleon's paunch when he was in his pride but later
refused to keep on pummeling the fellow after he was down,
But other poets [...]
kept beating on the sorry fellow, and his mother. (Poochigian trans.)

This, surely, is more honorable than the course the "Pod Save America" bros pursued—which was to defend Biden publicly when he was at the zenith of his power; to fall with lock-step behind his various abuses of asylum rights—and tell progressive immigration activists, in so many words, to "get over it" for the sake of party unity—but then to attack Biden once he's out of power. 

Let it be their part, not mine, to add contumely to his fall—to jab him with venom only once he's no longer able to defend himself—"to trample," in other words, "on the fallen"—to borrow Matthew Arnold's phrase. "Pitying tears, not scorn [...] Befit his fall," as John Greenleaf Whittier once wrote of another humbled politician—and we'd do well to recall, as he wrote, "the Tempter hath/ A snare for all."