This exchange between CNN’s Jake Tapper and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Sunday stunned me:
TAPPER: Don’t you think your party needs to acknowledge that President Biden was not up for the job of running for reelection and that this was a major mistake...
WALZ: He made that decision.
TAPPER: But you all went along with the idea that he was up for it. And he wasn’t. And everybody saw it, and the country rejected it.
WALZ: Look, history will tell us to go back on that. That very well could be the case, Jake. What I’m concerned about is learning from those lessons. I would hope we would never do it again, make a mistake … But I don’t know where it helps us going forward.
Let’s start here: Walz was a prominent defender of Joe Biden after the disastrous June 27 debate.
In an interview on PBS the day after the debate, Walz said this:
<i>I have done dozens of these myself. They don’t always go the way you want to … I’m not going to gloss over the fact that, look, this was not a great performance, but I’m still seeing the president do this job. I’m still seeing him be responsive to crisis situations and putting out policies that are going to make life better for people, unlike Donald Trump.</i>
Walz subsequently went to the White House in early July to meet with Biden, and emerged from that meeting insisting that the president was plenty fit to keep running and win.
That spin was, on its face, ridiculous. Because reporting—both before and after the June 27 debate—made clear that Biden’s debate performance wasn’t a one-off. It was part of a broader pattern that had already raised serious questions in some supporters’ minds about the president’s capacity to run.
There was, it is now clear, a willful blindness—and that is the kindest possible reading—within Biden’s inner circle and the broader Democratic political establishment about the president’s condition and capability. (At worst, this was a purposeful cover-up.)
Which is bad enough! But for the likes of Walz to still not admit that he was simply wrong in his assessment of Biden’s condition—and that the president and his team were WAY off in insisting he was just fine—seems to me to be a very dumb thing to do or say.
Because, as I have noted, Biden is headed for a very rough next few weeks. The revelations in “Fight”—the new book by Jon Allen and Amie Parnes—about who knew what when about Biden’s condition are alarming. And the forthcoming book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson—“Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again”—looks to me to be something that may well change how we all think about Biden forever.
Walz has said he is interested in running for president in 2028. Doing so requires leadership—especially given the dire state of the Democratic brand.
Leadership is not, when asked about his decision to support Biden’s campaign despite all evidence that the president simply was not up to it, saying: “Look, history will tell us to go back on that. That very well could be the case, Jake.”
Leadership is saying something like this: I took the president and his team at their word. That was clearly a mistake. Joe Biden should not have run again. In so doing, he put in place the dynamics that led to a second presidential term for Donald Trump.
Know another reason why Walz—and any other Democrat interested in leading the party in the future—should say that? Because it is undeniably true.
One last thing: Walz tried to downplay the importance of Democrats’ willingness to go along with Biden’s second term bid.
This defense make no sense. One of the major reasons that Democrats lost in 2024 was that the public felt as though they had been deceived; that Democrats had gone along with this myth that Biden was DOING GREAT even as anyone with eyes and ears could tell he wasn’t.
That loss of trust matters. It won’t, I don’t think, fix itself. Democrats who want to lead the party into the future need to say that Biden was clearly not up to running for a second term. That he should not have done so. And that, if they defended him doing so, they were a) wrong then and b) sorry now.
If you think this is all yesterday’s news, ask yourself this: Imagine a Republican had been president for the last four years. And that, amid doubts about his age and competence, all of the party’s most prominent elected officials insisted everything was just fine. Then the Republican president showed—in a high-profile debate—that everything was very much not fine.
You would, my guess, want a reckoning. You would want answers. And you would want explanations from the people who stood behind that president as to why they did so.
Right? Right. Because the presidency is a massively powerful office. Which means that we need to know that the person occupying the White House is at the top of their game—or damn close to it.
We now know Joe Biden wasn’t at the top of his game. Democrats like Walz need to admit it. Or else run the risk of not winning back the trust they’ve lost with the American public.
Want more ball and strike calling—no matter what uniform the batter at the plate is wearing? Check out Chris Cillizza’s Substack and YouTube channel.
