Boris Johnson’s departure proves it: Biden has to go

The British Conservative party is ruthless, y’all. The steady drip of scandal — defending disgraced MP Owen Paterson after he broke lobbying rules; a series of revelations that his staff and cabinet and possibly the prime minister himself breached their own Covid rules and held parties during lockdowns; allegations that his deputy chief whip Chris Pincher MP groped two young men at a private members’ club — has finally caught up with Boris Johnson, who today resigned as leader of the party and therefore the prime minister. While Conservatives choose a new leader, he will appoint an interim cabinet.

How lucky our British cousins are. Being able to dispatch a disgraced, degenerate, or even just a doddering head of government must be nice. We here in America wouldn’t know, but I wish we did. Looking at what’s happening in Westminster has me wishing something similar could happen in Washington, and that Joe Biden would meet a similar — if kinder — fate.

You read that right. After losing both the Clean Air Act and abortion rights to a rogue Supreme Court, with inflation out of control, and with a rise in far-right violence, President Biden’s toothless governing has left me utterly disillusioned. It is time for Democrats to recognize that there is too much at stake to continue trying to wring water from a stone. The time has come for a change in leadership of our own.

Plenty of people are thinking it. In a call last Monday with supporters and surrogates to discuss the overturning of Roe v. Wade, White House aides heard from disaffected Democrats who feel the president is not living up to expectations. CNN reported that one member of Congress described the White House as “rudderless, aimless and hopeless.”

Debra Messing of “Will & Grace” fame apparently raged that there didn’t seem to be a point to voting during one particularly scathing meeting. Meanwhile, former Obama administration senior advisor David Axelrod said that there is “this sense that things are kind of out of control and [Biden’s] not in command.” Gun control advocate and Parkland survivor Cameron Kasky tweeted that it is “very hilarious to see the Democrats who were publicly calling for Republicans to call out Trump for his bulls**t staying dead silent on Biden’s support of a pro-forced birth judge in Kentucky” after news broke that the president will appoint an anti-abortion radical to a federal judgeship in my home state.

Biden has not just lost support of celebrities and the Twitterati, though. His approval rating is 36 percent, the lowest of his presidency. He’s struggling with younger voters who are uninspired by his failure to play hardball with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, as well as Republicans. If those young voters stay home, we lose it all. And we cannot afford to lose it all.

I want to be very clear: Biden is not Boris. If anything, the more apt analogy is between boorish Boris and tyrannical Trump. Unlike his predecessor or the British prime minister, the president of the United States is an honorable man who truly wants the best for the American people. I really believe that. There is no scandal here as there is wherever Johnson goes. In fact, there is no whiff of anything other than integrity coming from the White House.

In simpler times, perhaps that would be enough. The 19^th century was filled with unremarkable presidents who nonetheless held the country together. The notable exceptions of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln, though, stand out because they rose to the challenges of their day, for better or for worse. Jefferson helped expand the nation and set the course for the rest of American history. Jackson wielded the presidency as a cudgel with cruel and unrelenting viciousness, committing a genocide in the process. Lincoln saved the Union and freed the slaves, even if he took the long way around.

Biden’s inaction is as much as it is the circumstances in which he finds himself. One of his biggest diplomatic failures — for a man who came into power boasting of his diplomatic prowess — has been failing to get Manchin and Sinema to fall in line. His tenuous Senate majority relies on these recalcitrant centrists and he has proven ineffectual at managing them. He is also far too married to the idea of bipartisanship, a nice idea that has become virtually impossible in the pro-Trump age.

Simply put, the president is a man out of time. He is in many regards a relic from a bygone era when bipartisanship was possible, norms were respected, and institutions were, if not revered, at least given some deference. As Kasky succinctly put it in another tweet: “In the face of the most dangerous and violent political shift to the far right in generations, Joe Biden has forced us to accept that he wants to be a 1980s politician. Makes sense. He’s wanted this since ’87. He’s living his dream.”

But this isn’t 1987. The Republican Party of 2022 is a rabid beast intent on ripping to shreds the very fabric of our democracy, and it is succeeding at a breakneck pace. Meanwhile, Biden is still spouting poetry about institutions and civic norms. This is a man who believes desperately in the traditions and norms of late-20^th century Washington — but their time has passed. Mitch McConnell saw to that. The only people who haven’t realized this are in the West Wing, and the biggest ostrich has his head buried in an Oval Office sandbox.

In that way, Biden is very much like Boris. The prime minister has tried to ignore, downplay, or shift blame for every scandal of his premiership — and Lord, there have been many. He’s pretended that everything is fine time and time again. Perhaps it’s optimism that makes him act that way. Perhaps it’s naivety. Perhaps it’s merely political calculation. But either way, he has something in common with Biden: Both are rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic while their political careers and their countries sink into the abyss.

The ruthlessness of the British Tories has worked out well for Britain this week. They will gladly stab their leaders in the front if they see them as weak, ineffective, or an electoral liability. Democrats need to take a page from their playbook and do the same.

Joe Biden is a good and decent man, but he is not the man we need leading us as we fight to save what’s left of American democracy. He’s bringing a 20^th century approach to a 21^st century problem — namely, how we secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity while Republicans descend into a Christo-fascist death cult.

We can’t afford weak and ineffectual leadership, even if the man in question is — at least compared to Boris Johnson — a saint.