Knowing when to quit
As Donald Trump ransacks America, the choices made by Joe Biden and Ruth Bader Ginsburg appear ever more tragic
In professional baseball, they are known as replacement-level players. In essence, these players are of a calibre such that they are available to acquire for nothing except the league minimum salary. The metric exists largely to provide a benchmark for how many more wins another player is worth compared with a replacement-level player in the same position.
Joe Biden and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are nobody’s idea of replacement-level players. This is in some ways to damn them with faint praise. Replacement-level players, as their meagre price tag suggests, are not very good. Indeed, a team comprised of such talents would be expected to manage just 20 to 25 wins in an entire 162-game baseball season.
Biden, for all his obvious flaws, was a fine politician, with an innate sense for the centre ground of the Democratic Party. In fact, this was an image he was keen to cultivate. In the 1990s, Biden endorsed Bill Clinton’s welfare and crime bills. As his party moved to the left, he supported progressive causes from college loan forgiveness to immigration reform.
As for Ginsburg, I do not need much persuasion to admire New York Jewish women of a certain vintage who are small in stature but big in heart and intellect. Ginsburg was a champion of female and racial equality long before reaching the Supreme Court, where, as a justice, she served as an inspiration to millions. Yet both Biden and Ginsburg made the same fatal mistake – not knowing when to leave the stage.
Biden’s decision to run for re-election came despite his sharp decline in mental acuity, and repeated polls suggesting a large majority of Americans, including a remarkable 86% according to an Ipsos survey from February last year, believed that the president was too old to run for a second term.
Biden thought he knew better1, and could only be persuaded to step aside following his calamitous debate performance against Donald Trump in June. Had he stepped down sooner, the Democrats would have had time for an open primary in which a stronger candidate than Kamala Harris might have emerged, or at least have given the vice president a longer runway in which to campaign.
Ginsburg could have retired under the presidency of Barack Obama, when up until 2014, the Democrats also held the Senate. Instead, and despite two bouts with cancer and into her eighties, Ginsburg clung on. Some critics denounced calls for her to step aside as sexist. Tragically for female reproductive freedom in the United States, she died weeks before the 2020 election, enabling the ascension of Amy Coney Barrett to the court. From that point onward, Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion were doomed.
To be clear, the principal blame for the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement lies with Republican voters. That Trump was eligible to run for a third time following the January 6 insurrection is down to Republican elites who refused to support his impeachment, and the Ginsburg-less Supreme Court that granted him immunity for acts committed as president. But we ought to be honest: liberals were not without agency.
I cringe at the sight of those Notorious RBG memes2, a title Ginsburg achieved following a furious dissent in response to a 2013 Supreme Court decision to invalidate a key section of the Voting Rights Act. And I have to look away when I see clips of that Biden debate performance, or those increasingly common freezes at public events. The tragedy is that by considering themselves to be irreplaceable, they shattered much of what they achieved.
Our loved ones are irreplaceable. The experiences that shape our lives are irreplaceable. Even objects, such as a pendant from a long-past friend, can be irreplaceable. But politicians – no matter how great or trailblazing – are usually not irreplaceable. And when the good guys and gals put their egos and sense of history ahead of their legacy and honour, they hand the bad guys a win.
I, for one, would prefer a world led by a democratic and law-abiding United States, rather than a hodgepodge of replacement-level nations.
This is a must-read piece on Biden’s final days by Chris Whipple, author of the new book, Uncharted
As Mark Joseph Stern of Slate has noted, Ginsburg was not even the most liberal Supreme Court justice. That was Sonia Sotomayor, nominated by Barack Obama in 2009
Thanks Jack, insightful as always. Just to point out the typo that RBG died before the 2020 election, not 2024.
Yes, the GOP was responsible for the rise of MAGA which really started with Reagan but the Dems refused to acknowledge the rôle of Christianity and the perversion of Christofascism. They were warned but denied that Xtianity could be so twisted, yet here we are. 'Trump Bibles' printed in the PRC.