Joe Biden has bowed to the inevitable and abandoned his bid to win a second term as US president. It’s a decision that should have been taken sooner. Biden’s climbdown has been greeted with a sigh of relief, especially by those who believe he has largely been a good, decent president.
Throughout his long political career Joe Biden has been a faithful friend to Ireland and, as taoiseach Simon Harris put it, quick to express a “fierce pride” in his Irish ancestry.
As president, he visited both north and south last year, marking the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement and tracing his family roots in Co Louth and Co Mayo. He is a “proud American with an Irish soul,” said Mr Harris.
It is fair to say that those bonds of friendship have been strained by the Biden administration’s kid gloves approach to Israel as it has ground Gaza to dust over the past nine months.
President Biden’s frailties, cognitive and physical, have been painfully exposed in recent weeks. It has been difficult to watch the 81-year-old struggle so obviously while stubbornly insisting he remained the right candidate to take the fight to Donald Trump, who wears his 78 years with relative lightness.
Biden’s shambolic performance in the televised debate between the two contenders - where even Trump seemed wrong-footed by the meandering inarticulacy of his sparring partner - marked the beginning of the end. Muddling up presidents Putin and Zelensky at the Nato conference was another high-profile gaffe. That Trump then dodged an assassin’s bullet while Biden was forced to isolate with Covid seemed to confirm that the hand of political destiny had set the two men on completely divergent trajectories.
Opinion polls are fickle but even before President Biden’s sharp public decline, Trump was in front. Whether Kamala Harris, who has been underwhelming as vice president, has what it takes to reverse that trend remains to be seen, though on the evidence to date it seems unlikely.
That Trump then dodged an assassin’s bullet while Biden was forced to isolate with Covid seemed to confirm that the hand of political destiny had set the two men on completely divergent trajectories
She has had the immediate backing of Biden and other heavyweight Democrats, including the Clintons, which could point to her coronation as the party’s presidential nominee at its convention next month. Barack Obama, meanwhile, is understood to believe the Democrats need to go through a process to select a nominee. Those differences, as well as her VP pick, will need to be quickly resolved if a Harris bid for the White House is to stand any chance against a buoyant Trump.
With trademark bombast, Trump greeted Biden’s withdrawal by denouncing him as “the worst president in the history of our country”; Harris, he taunted, will be “even easier to beat”. Trump might have the momentum for now, but everyone who believes in good, decent politics will want it to swing away from him soon.
