US President Joe Biden should announce he is not running for reelection in order to help Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections, Steven Isenberg, chief of staff to now-late New York Mayor John Lindsay, has argued.
In an opinion piece for the Washington Post, Isenberg gave his thoughts on why Biden’s decision “to save the midterms with a one-term pledge” should come “promptly”.
“First, and most important, the midterm elections this November would become about key issues and the quality of individual House and Senate candidates rather than the merits of Biden’s presidency and whether voters feel he should run again,” Isenberg pointed out.
He claimed that if the 46th US president doesn’t announces he is not running for reelection, the Democrats’ alleged “quiet campaign” against POTUS “will intensify - whether it comes from people who intend to challenge Biden in the primaries in 2024 or just to flex their muscles to discourage him from running again.”
The author added that all this is fueled by the US president’s low standing in the polls pertaining to his job performance and desirability as the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee.
Isenberg warned that Biden “retaining the prospect of a second term” might “unnecessarily” stir concerns related to the fact that the 79-year-old is “already seen by some as lame [duck] and lacking intensity — older, more frail, less persuasive — even when he says the right things.”
The ex-New York Newsday publisher argued that by making a one-term decision ahead of the midterms, Biden would “bolster” his agenda, and “silence the unnecessary polling questions and their unsettling results, which sap his hold on voters' patience and confidence.”
Icenberg’s remarks come after a Quinnipiac University opinion poll revealed that just 31% of American adults said they approve of the way Biden is handling his job, while 60% disapproved of it.
More than 70% of respondents said they didn’t want Biden to seek a second term in the White House, as compared to 60% of those who said they wouldn’t like to see former President Donald Trump run in 2024, according to the poll.
The findings followed a Reuters/Ipsos poll finding that Biden’s public approval rating had fallen to 36%, matching his record low in that survey.
The poll was preceded by the New York Times reporting earlier this month that with Biden planning to run for re-election in 2024, “his age has increasingly become an uncomfortable issue for him, his team and his party”. The newspaper argued that the 79-year-old POTUS is “testing the boundaries of age and the presidency,” and recalled that a year and a half into his first term, Biden is “already more than a year older than Ronald Reagan was” at the end of his two terms.
In mid-June, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed the 46th president’s push for reelection. “The president, as you know, has been asked that question many times, and he has answered it. His answer has been pretty simple, which is, yes, he's running for reelection. I can't say more than that,” she said.
Biden has repeatedly been mocked for a whole array of gaffes he has made during his nearly five-decade-long career as a politician. The US president himself admitted back in 2018 that he was “a gaffe machine,” something that was confirmed earlier in July, when he suddenly fell of his bike when riding, accidentally read the part on the teleprompter that says, "end of quote, repeat the line” and argued Switzerland rather than Sweden would be joining NATO.