photo by: Creators Syndicate

Keith Raffel

Dear Joe,

On the wall of my office is your letter thanking me for my help in passing a bill that protects national security. That’s from when you were a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and I was counsel to the committee.

If a vote had been taken in the 1980s by Capitol Hill insiders on who was the fastest-on-his-feet elected member, you would have won. At a hearing on that bill mentioned above — or was it a press conference? — my House of Representatives counterpart sighed with envy, “I wish I worked for someone that smart and articulate.”

When Robert Hur, the Republican special counsel investigating charges for mishandling classified information, called you a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” last March, I blamed it on partisanship. When the Wall Street Journal ran a story in early June headlined “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping,” I attributed it to the paper’s well-known anti-Biden bias.

I was wrong.

I watched your debate with Trump on June 27. This was not the Joe Biden I once knew, not even close. You excused your performance by saying that you had “a really bad cold,” that you needed to sleep more, that you’d been affected by international travel completed 11 days before the debate. On July 7, I watched your television interview with George Stephanopoulos. It was a performance reminiscent of the debate — often fumbling and inarticulate.

In a 1933 Marx Brothers movie, Chico asks, “Well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Sorry, Joe. I am going to believe my own eyes.

Your campaign aides point to your strong performance the day after the debate in North Carolina. Even granting that, I’m reminded of an elderly father’s children who say, “He has good days and bad days.”

Throwing you under the bus isn’t fair. If anyone should be denied a major party nomination, it’s the ex-president, not you, the current one.

Trump’s performance in the debate undercuts his pitch to be president far more than any stumbles you made. He lied when he said that during his presidency, we had “the greatest economy in the history of our country and we have never done so well.” The top year of growth in the gross domestic product under Trump was 2.9% in 2018, far short of Truman’s top year of 8.7%, Johnson’s 6.6%, Clinton’s 4.8% and your 5.9%. Trump accused you of allowing “millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country” and boasted that “Every legal scholar throughout the world” wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade. Both these assertions and many more were, in one of your favorite words, “malarkey.”

On the campaign trail, Trump called the nation of Argentina “a great guy” who “loves Trump.” Last month, he suggested migrants on the Southern border form a “fight club” to challenge the Ultimate Fighting Championship. On trial for a criminal conspiracy to cover up a potential sex scandal ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Trump fell asleep multiple times. And to know Trump is not to love him. His former Defense Secretary Mike Esper called him “a threat to democracy,” his former chief of staff Gen. John Kelly denounced him as “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions” and his former vice president, Mike Pence, refused to endorse him because he puts himself “over the Constitution.”

I’ve always thought what matters most in life is not what one says, but what one does. On that basis, you trounce your predecessor. You rallied support for Ukraine and oversaw passage of an infrastructure law. More Americans are working today than ever before, and the stock market has reached all-time highs. In the three weeks after you restricted asylum on the U.S.-Mexican border at the beginning of June, illegal entries dropped by 40%. In the three years after 2020, annual job growth in just under 1,000 of the nation’s poorest counties grew more than five times faster than in the previous three years.

And yet you still trail in the polls. As I wrote in a column last December, “If Biden cannot tell a better story than the one he is telling, he will lose.” And you have fallen further behind since the debate.

With Presidents Vladimir Putin in Russia, President Xi Jinping in China, leader Kim Jong Un in North Korea and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran, we face a dangerous world. We don’t want a president like Trump, who according to Gen. Kelly “admires autocrats and murderous dictators,” to be the one who faces them.

The pollster Nate Silver estimates you have at most a 29% chance of winning in November. American voters apparently prefer a blustering liar with meager accomplishments over one who gets stuff done while stumbling and hesitating. It’s as if the economy, Supreme Court appointments, NATO, democracy and civil liberties don’t matter.

Joe, I am so proud to have worked with you back in the day. I am proud to be one of the Americans who voted for you in 2020. I want you to be remembered as the president whose accomplishments rival those of Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt — not as the person who enabled a second term for Trump, who was found by a New York trial court to be a sex offender and by the Colorado Supreme Court to be an insurrectionist.

Nancy Pelosi stepped down as speaker at age 82, the same age you’ll be at the end of your current term. She’s said that time is running short for you to make a final decision whether to run.

It is indeed time for you to yield the Democratic nomination to a candidate who can articulately and energetically carry on your admirable legacy.

With deference, respect and gratitude,

Keith

— Keith Raffel has served as the senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee.