Robert Reich
Friends,
At a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, last Friday, President Biden said, “Some folks … are trying to push me out of the race.”
To whom was Biden referring?
Certainly not to Trump or the Republicans, who have been uncharacteristically silent about the whole question of whether Biden should drop out. They couldn’t push him out of the Democratic race anyway.
Nor was he referring to Democrats in Congress. Almost all have been publicly supportive of Biden. Only eight House Democrats out of 213 have called for him to drop out, and only one Senate Democrat has gone that far.
Was Biden referring to the leaders of the Democratic Party? Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the Senate majority leader and House Democratic leader, respectively, have been supportive of Biden, at least in public.
He couldn’t have been talking about the Democratic National Committee. Not a single DNC member has called for Biden to exit the race.
Was Biden talking about the elite punditry on cable TV and on the op-edpages of The New York Times and The Washington Post — almost all of whom have called for Biden to drop out?
Doubtful. The chattering class has little or no influence on the preferences of average voters. How many people at that Wisconsin rally read opinion pieces in The New York Times?
Did Biden have in mind some collection of gray-bearded leaders of America — a group of unofficial elder statesmen, perhaps including Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, whose counsel carries extraordinary influence behind the scenes?
There is no longer any such group. (I recall a time decades ago when a few old Democratic fixers such as Lloyd Cutler, held significant sway behind the scenes of official Washington. Not any more.)
But there is one small group of people in America with the power to push Joe Biden out of the race. Who are they? The major donors to the Democratic Party.
They’re the ones Biden is angry with.
On Monday morning, Biden called into MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and railed against the big-ticket donors who have been pushing him to withdraw.
“I’m getting so frustrated with the elites … the elites of the party,” he said on the air. “I don’t care what the millionaires think.”
Bingo. It was the first time any modern president has admitted that the elites of the party are the millionaires (and billionaires) who fund it, which gives them extraordinary political power — perhaps enough to push Biden out of the race.
In truth, the Democratic Party is little more than a national fundraising machine, as is the GOP.
I’m not faulting Biden for expressing his frustration with the party’s big money elite. He’s simply stating the truth. America’s donor class has become extraordinarily powerful, in both parties.
Biden and his top aides aren’t hiding this reality. To the contrary, they’re actively portraying the effort to remove him as driven by the party’s wealthy elite.
This may be an exaggeration. The polling data I’ve seen suggests that concerns about Biden’s age and evident decline worry a wide swath of the public.
But Biden is trying to persuade the party’s major donors of his viability. Soon after Biden shared with the hosts of “Morning Joe” his frustrations with the moneyed elite of the party, he held a Zoom call with that very same elite.
In that call, according to The New York Times, he told them that they had to shift the focus of the campaign away from him and onto Trump.
Telling them to shift their focus seemed further evidence that, at least in Biden’s mind, the party’s biggest donors were responsible for focusing on Biden’s debate stumbles in the first place. And it was theywho must shift their focus back to Trump.
I just read a New York Times op-ed by actor George Clooney, who calls for Biden to drop out. I’m not aware of any special political expertise Clooney brings to the table, except for what he states in the very first paragraph of his op-ed: “I have led some of the biggest fund-raisers in my party’s history,” he writes. “Last month I co-hosted the single largest fundraiser supporting any Democratic candidate ever, for President Biden’s re-election.”
I guess that makes Clooney’s view highly relevant.
Over the last week and a half, I’ve been immersed in countless discussions about whether Biden should drop out of the race. I expect you have as well.
But those discussions are irrelevant. You and I aren’t going to persuade Biden to stay in the race or to drop out.
Only one group is going to persuade him — the Democratic Party’s biggest donors. If they decide to stop funding the Biden campaign, Biden has no chance of winning.
It’s now becoming a game of chicken. If the biggest donors stop funding Biden and Biden stays in the race notwithstanding, he clearly loses. Yet so do we all.
Biden’s efforts over the last few days confirm much of what I’ve increasingly observed over the years. The real political power in America, regardless of party, lies in the hands of big money.
Celebrity pays off. George's tequila company was purchased for $1 billion in 2017.
Robert Reich was U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997. A long time professor at University of California, Berkeley, he is the author of eighteen books, as well as chair of Common Cause, co-founder of The American Prospect, the Economic Policy Institute, and Inequality Media. This piece originally appeared in his Substack column, under the title "My Mentor and Friend, Ken Galbraith." Read more of Reich here.