We're Learning the Wrong Lessons from Biden's Decision to Run in 2024

It seems like a story about Biden's age, but it's really a story about the presidency itself

This week, we received the news that former president Joe Biden has been diagnosed with cancer, and this is not my area of expertise, but it sounds pretty bad. This is obviously awful news for anyone to receive, and sad to hear on a human level. On a political level, it plays right into the re-litigation of what happened in 2024 among Democrats, and between the party and the president.

The news comes on the heels of much discussion around Biden’s age, mental and physical condition, and decision to run for reelection in 2024, driven in part by the release of a new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. I’ve also been listening to the audiobook version of Fight, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes , which goes into great depth about the 2024 debate with Donald Trump 11 months ago, and the intraparty drama leading up to Biden’s decision to leave the race about a month later.

What I want to take on here is the specific framing and presentation of these stories. I’d like to make a political scientist’s plea – inevitably, a hopeless one – for us to pay more attention to the structural and institutional elements of the situation, and less to the interpersonal drama.

First, in listening to an interview with Tapper and The New Yorker’s David Remnick, there’s a lack of clarity about what exactly the problem was. I can’t do better than Noah Berlatsky (correction: I incorrectly attributed that to Aaron Rupar) at describing how much we’ve heard about this exact problem of Biden being old. At the time (after the debate) I posed some questions about what exactly our concerns were – about electability, about governance, etc. This came up in the podcast discussion I listened to – there were the concerns about whether Biden was up to the demands of a reelection campaign, and then the question of what if he had run and won.

The obvious perspective is that the most demanding or perplexing Constitutional crisis would still be much less threatening to the health of the republic than what has happened so far in a second Trump term. (Some recent examples: arresting a member of Congress for protesting, cuts to federal weather preparedness systems leading to unnecessary death and destruction). But some of the issues surrounding a hypothetical Biden second term are (hypothetically) real. If Biden had run again and died in office, then the Constitution is pretty clear about what to do: the vice president becomes president. For presidents who are incapacitated, it’s a lot less clear. The 25^th amendment was an effort to address this problem after it came up a number of times in the twentieth century – but it doesn’t really draw a clear roadmap for what to do when a president can’t really fulfill the decision-making role and yet remains alive. It tries, but lays out a process vulnerable to all sorts of loopholes and ambiguities.

The story of the 25^th amendment, however, makes the case for flipping the question around. It’s not really about why Biden chose to run for reelection or what the people around him were doing; part of the problem is the lack of structures to address how dependent our system is on the health and well-being of a single individual. In some ways, this is an very old problem in the study of the presidency: the struggle for the capacity of the office to keep up with the demands of it.

It's also more productive to think about Biden’s almost-renomination in institutional terms. I made this argument last year, as the heated primary contest among Biden, Dean Phillips, and “uncommitted” raged on. Parties have learned the lesson that competitive primaries are risky and basically not done when there’s a sitting president running for reelection. The accounts of the process by which Biden stepped down really illustrate the weakness of national parties and the resulting complexity of the nomination process. There’s a formal process for the nomination, but it’s governed and buffeted by informal rules and expectations. The channels by which Biden was pressured to step down and Harris was selected to succeed him on the ticket were also informal, with influential players working largely out of public view.

So-called “Biden people” seem to be at the center of many of these dramatic accounts. The problem is presented as one in which Biden’s most loyal political advisors and allies refused to face the truth about his health and capacities, and to be honest with the public (more about that in a bit). Another way to think about this problem is that the larger political party – a loose conglomeration of influential players like Nancy Pelosi – had to directly confront a separate presidential organization. A presidentially-led campaign operation has the candidate the center, surrounded by people who are loyal and owe their political careers to him. This may why we see the First Lady figure so heavily into this story – she’s one of the few people in the inner circle who has something like an equal partnership with the president. This is actually a very strange way to do party politics, with a parallel, president-centered organization competing with, and within, the party organization. Such a structure really impedes the ability of the party to balance out presidential power, and pretty much guarantees we’ll run into this problem again.

Media framing, however, seems to have zeroed in on the story of the “cover up.” Plenty of people have pointed out that this was approximately as covered up as a Super Bowl halftime show. I’ll refrain. It’s not a terribly surprising framing. Adaptation of the old Watergate language taps into familiar, and demoralizing, themes of distrust in government. It offers a story of conflict and morality, placing individual failures at the center of the narrative.

And perhaps this framing has some value: certainly, the American people have the right to expect transparency and honesty from those in power. But we should also ask why the incentives to act with more integrity aren’t there, and how we ended up in a place where “the president’s people” – separate from the accountability that parties can provide – have so much sway at all. The “cover up” frame lets our atrophied and distorted institutions off the hook. Accounts that emphasize the role of individuals point to solutions in which a different cast of characters – not serious structural change – can address the failures of democratic health that we face. That kind of thinking is what led to the Biden presidency, and the dilemmas it produced, in the first place.