Biden's curtain call: How do you leave the political stage when you really don’t want to go? - By Jon Sopel

By Jon Sopel

@jonsopel

President Joe Biden's Oval Office address marked the end of his re-election bid. But how do you bow out gracefully when you were pushed?

How do you leave the stage? I mean, not literally, of course. If we’re talking literally you walk down the steps or jump down. Simples. No, how do you leave the political stage when the curtain is coming down and you really don’t want to go?

Joe Biden had a first stab at it last night with his Oval Office address to the nation. The tone was wistful; the voice was a whisper. The kid from Scranton with the stutter had made it all the way to the top, but for the good of American democracy it was time to pass the baton to a younger generation.

When he says it’s for the good of US democracy what he’s really saying is ‘we’ve got to stop Trump by any means’.

There was no talk in Biden’s address to the nation of the pressure he has been under: that growing chorus of Democrat lawmakers calling for him to go; the party’s powerbrokers in his ear saying ‘you are now past your sell-by date. Get out before we push you.’

That was all left unsaid. But everyone knows the truth. This was not a decision that Biden took willingly, having had a relaxing weekend with the family to chew the matter over. This was a decision borne of the humiliating performance in that debate with Trump at the end of June. A decision arrived at after the big bucks donors put away their platinum credit cards. An America looking at their president and thinking he’s in serious cognitive decline.

And so another political career ends not in dignity but in tears. There was almost a mournful air to the address last night. He will go down as another one term president, who though avoiding the ignominy of defeat in the polls, has endured something arguably worse: political death by the collective will of his party.

Lyndon B. Johnson back in 1968 – the last president to announce he would not be seeking a second term – went much earlier in the election cycle. But he left with the Vietnam War in full, bloody force and America’s youth being drafted to fight. The chant ringing in his ears was ‘hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’ For all the great things that Johnson achieved in the 1960s – the civil rights act, voting reform, the war on poverty being the most notable – he left high office a broken man.

The British politician of that era, Enoch Powell, remarked that all political careers end in failure (Powell himself became toxic after his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech). Give me the name of a British PM who left Downing Street at a moment of their choosing, head held high. Tricky isn’t it?

In the US, of course it is slightly different because of the two-term limit. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan all left office with heads held high and undefeated – and probably would have won re-election if they’d been able to stand again. But the truism holds: political careers do tend to end unhappily, and for all the dignity of Biden’s address last night I bet he is raging inside.

Joe Biden pulls out of the presidential race: 'It was unwinnable'

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