Another day, another replacement for President Joe Biden being touted by someone with a platform.
Christopher T. Brooks isn’t necessarily the biggest name in the punditocracy, to be sure. The East Stroudsburg University history professor and member of the Pennsylvania Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has contributed to publications such as The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, but he’s usually not the type to make headlines.
On Thursday, he quite literally did, writing an opinion piece in The Hill urging that Biden be thrown overboard by the Democratic Party — for a guy who has held the governorship of Maryland for one year.
“Are Democrats ignoring the next Obama to save Biden’s struggling campaign?” the headline on Brooks’ article read.
Now, you can believe that Wes Moore has a decent background without exactly singling him out as the kind of guy for whom you backstab a sitting president determined to run for another four years in office — however inadvisable that run might be.
Moore is a Rhodes Scholar, an Army Reserve intelligence officer with the 82nd Airborne Division who served in Afghanistan and a man who has held other prominent positions in the public and private sector before he won the 2022 election to become governor of Maryland, an overwhelmingly blue state.
Moreover, he checks what have come to be known as “the intersectional boxes.”
“The son of Cuban-Jamaican immigrants, Moore went on to work in the banking sector and then ran the Robin Hood Foundation, an advocacy organization with the ‘common commitment to helping low-income New Yorkers escape poverty’s grasp,’” Brooks wrote. “Moore is currently the nation’s third African-American to be elected governor of any state. He is Maryland’s first.
“Given this record, why are Democrats still sticking with Biden-Harris instead of someone who possesses at least as much charisma as a 2004-era Obama?”
Moreover, his opponent in the governor’s race ran into what another Hill contributor called “a buzzsaw of charisma embodied by Wes Moore.”
The journey of this campaign is one that many saw as improbable.
But Maryland, you believed. You put in the work. And thanks to you, I am humbled to be Maryland’s next governor.
What we built together is not just a moment—it is a movement.
It is Maryland’s time to lead. pic.twitter.com/UyELkn3Jnt
— Gov. Wes Moore (@iamwesmoore) November 10, 2022
“Why not use that and improve your chances of winning?” Brooks asked. “Why not the person whom then-President Obama appointed to the Corporation for National and Community Service Board in 2014?”
Brooks is not an unreconstructed progressive, and the professor noted that Moore’s biography “concluded that a key reason” he succeeded where other African-Americans didn’t “is the poisoned reservoir of low expectations from which too many Black Americans are forced to drink.”
“We are not promised anything — in a moment’s notice things can change by the decisions that we make,” Moore wrote.
Brooks sees this as the kind of moderate figure independents could rally behind, even though the evidence hardly suggests the governor is anything more than a hard-left liberal. (He supports radical gun control efforts, slashed charter school programs that helped ensure low-income students had some degree of school choice, called voter ID laws “voter suppression,” is an ardent supporter of organized labor and describes parental control over what books are available in public school libraries as “book banning,” among other fine things during his one year in elected office.)
But never mind, because those are the kinds of things those who wrote paeans to Barack Obama before he was elected and Hillary Clinton before she wasn’t tended to elide over, as well.
“With all of these pluses in Moore’s toolkit, why, pray tell, are the Democrats making such a poor decision when, as Moore might put it, they are not promised anything?” Brooks wrote. “Why is that party choosing to remain in the quagmire in which it has placed itself with Biden?”
Should the Democrats ditch Joe Biden?
Yes, kicking Biden to the curb “would be a slap in the face to him and to those who choose to think their eyes are lying about the aging and increasingly deteriorating 46th president,” but it’s one that’s worth pursuing, in Brooks’ opinion.
“Biden has done some good things, but there is growing evidence that his mental acuity is slipping. It is sad to watch him make so many cringy comments,” he continued.
“One directed at Moore is not an exception. In 2023, Biden referred to Maryland’s first Black governor as ‘the boy.’ This is not only strikingly racist but demonstrative of political cluelessness.”
And mind you, it’s not like the governor is seeking the Oval Office. “Moore, like most Democrats, is playing nice in the sandbox. He isn’t stepping on the elder statesman’s toes, a wise act under normal circumstances,” Brooks wrote.
“Are these normal circumstances, though? Isn’t it time for the Maryland governor, or some other Democrat, to stand up and take the swing from the guy who’s been on it for more than half a century? That is for the Democratic National Committee to decide.”
Brooks’ article would be more or less meaningless if it weren’t for the fact that he’s not the only figure of some stature who’s saying, with a little over eight months to go until the election, that the Democrats need to change horses.
In fact, in the past week, two influential people on the left have specifically called for Biden to step aside.
First came Ezra Klein, co-founder of Vox, now with The New York Times, who said the Democratic National Committee should convince Biden not to run again and then pick its nominee at the convention, a practice that hearkens back to the old days of American politics.
“We had to wait till this year — till now, really — to see Biden even begin to show what he’d be like on the campaign trail,” Klein said in an audio essay on Feb. 16. “And what I think we’re seeing is that he is not up for this. He is not the campaigner he was, even five years ago.”
“But even given that, I was stunned when his team declined a Super Bowl interview,” he continued. “Biden is not up by 12 points. He can’t coast to victory here. He is losing. He is behind in most polls. He is behind, despite everything people already know about Donald Trump. He needs to make up ground. If he does not make up ground, Trump wins. The Super Bowl is one of the biggest audiences you will ever have. And you just skip it? You just say no?”
“I want to say this clearly: I like Biden. I think he’s been a good president. I think he is a good president,” Klein said. “I don’t like having this conversation. And I know a lot of liberals, a lot of Democrats are going to be furious at me for this show.
“But to say this is a media invention, that people are worried about Biden’s age because the media keeps telling them to be worried about Biden’s age? If you have really convinced yourself of that, in your heart of hearts, I almost don’t know what to tell you.
“In poll after poll, 70 percent to 80 percent of voters are worried about his age. This is not a thing people need the media to see. It is right in front of them, and it is also shaping how Biden and his campaign are acting.”
Then, on Monday, Nate Silver — the left-leaning wonk who founded election handicapping website FiveThirtyEight — said the president “needs to reassure the American public that he’s capable of handling public appearances that aren’t on easy mode. Or he needs to stand down. Or he’s probably going to lose to Trump.”
Biden needs to reassure the American public that he’s capable of handling public appearances that aren’t on easy mode. Or he needs to stand down. Or he’s probably going to lose to Trump.https://t.co/LOdYjPA9NZ
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 19, 2024
“Personally, I crossed the rubicon in November, concluding that Biden should stand down if he wasn’t going to be able to run a normal reelection campaign — meaning, things like conduct a Super Bowl interview,” Silver wrote in a Substack post.
“Yes, it’s a huge risk and, yes, Biden can still win. But he’s losing now and there’s no plan to fix the problems other than hoping that the polls are wrong or that voters look at the race differently when they have more time to focus on it.”
What would change his and America’s mind, particularly after a special counsel’s report declined to charge him with willfully retaining classified information in part because a jury might find him to be “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”?
“Over the course of the next several weeks, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with ‘non-friendly’ sources,” Silver wrote. “‘Non-friendly’ doesn’t mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great.”
“A complete recording of the interviews should be made public. The interviews ought to include a mix of different media (e.g. television and print) and journalistic perspectives,” he continued. “So could I, other critics and 75 percent of Americans be wrong about this? Sure. I’m wrong about a lot of things. But if we’re wrong about this, it ought to be easy to prove it.”
These aren’t just hot-take voices on MSNBC or Fox News panels. Klein, Silver and Brooks are people who take what they say seriously — sometimes a bit too seriously, in certain cases — and each of them is saying that, even with the primary process well underway, it’s time to hit the panic button.
In the case of Klein and Silver, it’s really up to the party; they have no preference. Meanwhile, Brooks is literally saying that a guy who’s been governor of the state of Maryland for a single year — his only elected office — should pinch hit for Biden because 1) he has charisma, 2) he has totally functioning grey matter and 3) he doesn’t continually make racial solecisms the way Biden does.
And you know what? These aren’t bad arguments, even though Joe Biden has been in the White House for two years longer than Moore has been in office and in an elected position for 50 (!!) years longer than Moore.
That doesn’t make Moore the next Obama — nor, in my opinion, should American voters be looking for him, if he exists — but it confirms that the more Democrats see regarding Joe Biden’s ability to campaign for himself, the less they like.
The question is, how many thought leaders have to jump ship and poll numbers have to hit new lows before Biden finally gets the message?
