Joe Biden, Isolated in Delaware, Plans His Next Move

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Depending on their vantage, Democrats who watched Donald Trump’s record-breaking 92-minute acceptance speech on Thursday—and stretching into Friday—came away with very different verdicts. 

For those who have been urging President Joe Biden to rethink his own re-nomination for three full weeks, Trump’s ominous rhetoric proved the risks the former President poses and why the incumbent should step aside for a stronger captain. For those still working to salvage Biden’s bid for a second term, Trump's wildly inconsistent delivery and tone made the task of blocking him seem perhaps doable for the first time in a long while.

But a third audience—population, one—was the only one that mattered, and that was Biden himself isolating at his beach house on the Delaware coastline while he recovers from what doctors described as a mild case of Covid-19. And after watching the Trump's meandering hodgepodge of a greatest-hits speech in Milwaukee, Biden still sees himself as the strongest player to boot his predecessor from the field of American politics. The White House declared “a lid” just after 9:30 a.m., meaning there would be no sightings of Biden in public on Friday, and he would remain at home with no public events. The bunkering continued with no public timeline for his return to Washington, although he says he wants to get back on the campaign trail next week.

Biden, aides say, is still working the phones and Zoom rooms with advisers and staff, going about the day-to-day task list of the President, such as facing a global computer meltdown that left U.S. airspace a hellscape on Friday. But Biden is also finding himself increasingly, albeit begrudgingly, open to conversations about his next moves. His family is starting to plot his exit. In that, Democrats mindful of their own fortunes are suddenly less sullen about the slog toward November’s Election Day.

After three full weeks of pummeling, Biden is finally starting to take the hint that no one in his party’s institutional ranks wants him to helm the ticket. Even his former boss, Barack Obama, is harboring fears, insiders say. Public and private polls alike are showing Biden a drag on fellow Democrats, although his defenders argue that he’s not as much of a clunker as the critics say. For the first time since the debate, Biden is at least testing his own assumptions even as he is disinclined to cede ground to his critics. His weekend in Rehoboth is expected to give him a window to reflect on the information that is reaching him. 

As the private conversations that started as a rumble have grown into a roar, it still remains Biden’s call how to proceed. As Republicans gavel out their convention, the disparity between the comity-soaked Republicans and the chaos-sacked Democrats is glaring. Behind the scenes, Democrats were left in an awkward holding pattern. Biden’s top operative, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said in a television interview on Friday that Biden was 100% committed to staying atop the ticket. "Absolutely, the President is in this race,” she told MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “Joe Biden is more committed than ever to beat Donald Trump, and we believe on this campaign [that] we are built for the close election that we are in, and we see the path forward."

Still, another Biden insider, former two-time chief of staff Ron Klain, acknowledged his boss gets it. “I think he’s feeling the pressure,” Klain told the network.

To be clear: the pressure is real. The Democratic National Committee on Friday and again on Sunday was set to revisit the rules and guidelines for the nominating process. Party insiders quietly agreed that they’d delay Biden’s official renomination timeline to start after Aug. 1, a slight shift rightward on the calendar. Still, Democrats are moving forward with a plan to have Biden arrive at his nominating convention in Chicago on Aug. 19 as the settled nominee. A repeat of the messy 1968 convention in Chicago was to be avoided at all costs, even if that meant deciding the nomination by GoogleDoc and silencing the protests on social media timelines. Democratic insiders agreed to put off the formality, but not too long.

That doesn’t mean Democrats of any stripe are exactly happy after the last month. Biden’s campaign insisted on an early debate and then the candidate bombed. Biden’s clean-up efforts were miserable. His fundraising has all but dried up, with aides bemoaning that they’d be lucky to hit 25% of their major-dollar goal this month. And down-ballot Democrats—including marquee party insiders like Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries—are telling the White House in stage whispers that the party’s fortunes were sinking with Biden’s poll numbers. 

“He just doesn’t get it,” says a senior Democratic hand on the Hill. “Joe Biden has done so much for this country but he stands to be the undoing of this party.”

Democrats across the spectrum are trying to discern if Biden understands that being an anchor for his party is not always an asset. Sure, he’s keeping the Democratic barge in place, but it’s not a good place. The inertia is the best case scenario but insiders say the drift is actually benefiting Republicans, who have a narrow majority in the House and are within real striking distance of winning back the Senate. Other Democrats who want Biden to keep fighting looked at Trump’s Milwaukee soliloquy as evidence that he’s still defeatable if only the media would focus on his precedent-shattering posture rather than Biden’s verbal stumbles. Biden’s campaign has a simple counter: stop fighting Biden’s renomination and the focus moves back to Trump.

One common emotion pervaded both Democratic camps, though: they’re all waiting on Biden to either plow forward as the presumptive nominee or to bow out. Biden has been trying to demonstrate the former, but not convincingly enough. In private, Biden’s top deputies say he’s less headstrong than he was over the July 4 holiday weekend, finally starting to grasp that his choices matter to more than just those who share his surname. 

By no means does this mean Biden is ready to exit. No, he’s still plotting an aggressive travel schedule this month and readying tens of millions in advertising. The money is becoming tougher to come by, but he has a pile of cash that is letting him lap Trump on air by a 25-to-1 margin in some markets. Things are going to be rough for Biden as he tries to quiet the tumult in his own party’s ranks but he’s found himself running against the conventional wisdom before. And, if things go sideways in a big way, he still controls the levers of his party’s nominating machinery; the nod is his until he doesn’t want it, and the signs that he may soon be ready to give it up remain fuzzy. Put plainly: Democrats have only one opinion that matters, and that belongs to an embattled Joe Biden who has never been at his best when backed into a corner.

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