In 1968, Lyndon Johnson was running for re-election in a party badly divided by the Vietnam War. An upstart senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, decided to challenge him for the Democratic nomination.
At that time, it was still not necessary for a presidential candidate to appear on every single state ballot. Johnson, feining disinterest, was not on the New Hampshire presidential ballot. He was so confident of victory that his aides were running a write-in campaign.
Then McCarthy's legion of young people showed up. About 3,000 college kids swarmed all over the state of New Hampshire. They had gotten "Clean for Gene," shaving their beards, cutting their hair, and going door-to-door across the length and breadth of the Granite State.
In the end, McCarthy won 42% of the vote. Johnson had won the state but realized that it would be a hard, slogging fight to win the nomination. He was in the midst of negotiations with Hanoi to end the war, and the closeness of the vote had injured his pride. Accordingly, he dropped out of the presidential contest a few weeks later.
But Johnson did not resign the presidency. Instead, he hovered around the edges of the race for the nomination for months, teasing his Vice President Hubert Humphrey with hints that he may not support him.
The antiwar caucus preferred Bobby Kennedy or George McGovern. The establishment (with Johnson hovering) was supporting Humphrey. Kennedy appeared well on his way to the nomination when he won California on June 6 and was well-positioned to take the nomination on the first or second ballot in Chicago. The rest is history.
There were many Democrats at the time who believed that Johnson should resign and give Humphrey a leg up going into the campaign. But Johnson, a vindictive, petty man, couldn't bear to give up power and allow an understudy to take a starring role. In fact, he made a couple of attempts to sideline Humphrey and jump back into the race. But it was far too late.
Here we are again with a president trying to decide whether he should drop out of the race for president and give the spot to his vice president. The same questions asked of Johnson are now being asked of Biden.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) nailed it.
“The question is, if he's not going to be their nominee because he's not up to it, how can he be our president for the next six months?” Rubio told reporters at the Republican Party of Florida breakfast. “If there's something wrong with you that doesn't allow you to run for president, how can you still be there as president? If they're going to remove him as nominee, they’ve got to remove him as president, and that's really bad for our country.”
“They have no one to blame but themselves,” Rubio continued. “They knew Joe Biden — I don’t mean this to be cruel, but they knew the condition that he was in, and they deliberately hid it from the world. And it makes you wonder who's running our country. That's what I worry about.”
Presidential historian Alexis Coe thinks Biden should resign in order to allow the country to become "better acquainted" with Kamala Harris.
There’s only one move left: Biden must resign. By doing so, his name would always appear alongside that of the woman president’s ascension to the highest office. Gerald Ford predicted America’s first woman President would ascend from the Vice Presidency, and though it’s not ideal, given the present circumstances, it feels necessary. It’s hard to imagine, with no rising star in the party, the Democrats bypassing Kamala Harris as their nominee. And strategically, it’s the only way to guarantee the country becomes better acquainted with her through inevitable media focus on the historic nature of her candidacy. She can easily be cast as the comparatively youthful, optimistic foil to Trump, a doom-and-gloom senior citizen.
Rubio's point is spot-on. The American people will ask: If Biden isn't able to continue in the race because of his health, what's he doing sitting in the Oval Office? Otherwise, the Democrats are exposed as hypocrites and liars who got rid of Biden because he was going to lose even though the overwhelming number of Democratic primary voters wanted him.
Who is it that will "destroy democracy"?
