Biden Resists Mounting Pressure to Withdraw Amid Health Concerns

In 1944, after nearly twelve years in the White House, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was determined to win reëlection, even as his body was failing him. Polio, hypertension, and heart disease had ravaged him.

But the Second World War was raging, and Roosevelt was convinced that he was the person best equipped to safeguard his achievements, defend democracy, and stop future aggression. Roosevelt ordered his handlers and the Secret Service to disguise his frailties.

Eight decades after Roosevelt’s final campaign, America is again confronting an election defined by the stubborn determination of the men at its center. Joe Biden is beset by mounting pressure to withdraw, which he has doggedly resisted. Biden is marching down a path of constant peril, with a narrowing window of time to nominate Vice-President Kamala Harris or another prospect.

Less than six weeks before Democrats formally choose their nominee, Biden is marching down a path of constant peril: whenever he appears in front of a camera, he runs the risk of further inflaming fears about his fitness to beat Trump—to say nothing of serving another four years—with a narrowing window of time to nominate Vice-President Kamala Harris or another prospect.

A short while later, during a rare press conference intended to demonstrate his capacity to handle unscripted events, he flubbed his answer to the first question, referring to Harris as “Vice-President Trump.”

In Washington, the performance scarcely improved the mood among Democrats. Minutes later, Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became the fourteenth member of the House to call on Biden to drop out, writing in a statement, “I hope that, as he has throughout a lifetime of public service, he will continue to put our nation first.”

Even as concerned allies came forward, Biden’s campaign was rallying a diverse coalition to push in the opposite direction.

Reports indicate that Biden aimed to end his workdays at eight o’clock, he said they were false—he had meant to suggest that he would “pace” himself and start fund-raisers at eight o’clock instead of nine, so “people get to go home by ten o’clock.”

At the NATO press conference, Biden argued that the “gravity of the situation” facing the country requires his experience. Biden had dismissed earlier calls to withdraw as the work of “élites in the Party” (“I don’t care what the millionaires think”).