President Joe Biden is facing calls to not just stop at his to end his re-election campaign.
On Sunday, conservative magazine National Review said in an op-ed, “Joe Biden did the right thing in ending the charade of asking the American public to believe that he was capable of serving another four years as president.”
“This was preposterous, and the public, as the polling has consistently shown for a long time, didn’t believe it,” it continued. “Now, Biden has issued a statement dropping out of the race and has endorsed his vice president Kamala Harris.”
The op-ed then suggested Biden should “take the next logical step and resign the presidency.”
The op-ed explained:
“It’s possible to imagine a president not being able to campaign but still being capable of carrying out his official duties — say, if he had a serious physical impairment. And it is even possible to imagine a president who could serve for another six months but not another four and a half years. But such scenarios do not apply to Biden.”
The op-ed noted, “Biden has obviously been confused in public, and we are getting disturbing reports of his not recognizing friends and Democratic lawmakers in private. He has not convened a full cabinet meeting since last October.”
“Whatever the level of his decline at the moment, it is sure to get worse. The country deserves to have complete assurance that the president of the United States, whatever his party or ideology, is fully in possession of his faculties,” it argued.
Additionally, National Review suggested Biden resigning as president would “also likely create more of a honeymoon for Kamala Harris and perhaps make it easier for her to hit reset in the campaign.
After noting that in a different world, Democrats would have more time to choose a replacement, it said, “Democrats wouldn’t be in this fix if Biden and his family had taken full accounting of his aging when they decided to run again last year and if the White House, Democratic leaders, the press, and various other insiders hadn’t undertaken an effort to cover up Biden’s state. They all knew what was going on but figured that if they didn’t talk about it, somehow people wouldn’t notice. Of course, they did.”
The magazine then accused Democrats of engaging in a “cover-up” to “deceive the American people” about Biden.
“The serious potential candidates were sidelined by pressure to close ranks publicly behind Biden, who refused to debate the few, marginal primary opponents he attracted. The party owes an apology to Congressman Dean Phillips, who ran a quixotic campaign to sound the alarm,” it argued.
The op-ed suggested of Harris:
“It’s unclear how a Kamala Harris nomination would affect the race. She would instantly take the age issue off the table and may be able to regain some ground among traditional Democratic constituencies. On the other hand, as a woke, relatively young progressive from California, she probably wouldn’t do as well as Biden did among older white voters. Harris would be vulnerable to the charge of radicalism in a way Biden wasn’t as a doddering old man, and certainly nothing prior to this extraordinary turn of events has suggested that she’s an exceptional political talent. As Biden’s vice president, she also carries both the policy baggage of his administration and her own implication in the cover-up.”
Still, it pointed out former President Donald Trump is not incredibly popular according tot he polls and that Harris will likely “get a burst of fundraising and positive media attention,” it then said, “It’s safer to assume that this will be a real race.”
“At least the centerpiece of the Democratic campaign will no longer be a flagrant falsehood that nearly everyone recognizes as such,” the op-ed concluded. “Biden is no longer offering himself up as the next president of the United States until January 2029 and, if he really wants to put the country first as he said in his statement, should resign the presidency right now.”
