Reuters

Lisa Van Dusen

March 15, 2023

Fifty-five years ago this month, on March 31^st, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not be running for re-election. “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president,” Johnson famously said in a televised speech from the Oval Office. It was the bombshell kicker that came 40 minutes into an address about a bombing pause in Vietnam and overture to a negotiated settlement of the war.

Johnson’s remarks that Sunday evening are also remembered for the following warning to America: “And in these times as in times before, it is true that a house divided against itself by the spirit of faction, of party, of region, of religion, of race, is a house that cannot stand.”

Before the week was out, Martin Luther King Jr. would be assassinated. Two months later, Bobby Kennedy was murdered. As Johnson had said in prefacing his announcement, “America’s future” was “under challenge right here at home.”

The question of whether President Joe Biden will run again has been the cause of predictable political agitation and no shortage of entertaining linkage. For weeks, key political actors were preparing for the probability that Biden will run while simultaneously preparing for the possibility that he won’t while attempting to disguise the latter as the former, as an abundance of spec pieces composed a polytree graph of bet-hedging, contingency planning, pro-active machinating and plausible deniability-by-proxy drops.

Just some of the fun to be had amid the will-he-or-won’t-he limbo laments has been in discerning the not-so-invisible hand — to filch Adam Smith via, appropriately enough, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang — of the usual Knives Out propaganda suspects in this tapestry of tactical shenanigans.

Biden may not run — and top Dems are quietly preparing, read the Politico headline last month above a catalogue of complaints about how the president was keeping everyone in suspense. A more recent Atlantic piece — The Topic Biden Keeps Dodging — pre-emptively castigates Biden for forgoing a 2024  culture war with decoy fascists who use terms like “the woke mind virus” in favour of focusing on kitchen table economic issues, revisiting a pre-midterm coverage motif that framed and shot down every Democratic strategy in quick succession until the historic results spoke for themselves.

Just some of the fun to be had amid the will-he-or-won’t-he limbo laments has been in discerning the not-so-invisible hand — to filch Adam Smith via, appropriately enough, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang — of the usual Knives Out propaganda suspects in this tapestry of tactical shenanigans.

Among the pre-existing themes most frequently logrolled during this period of — per Politico’s formulation — Hamlet-on-the-Christina (the river in Delaware, not the Applegate) is the continued trolling of Vice President Kamala Harris; a perpetual takedown that gets reanimated at opportune junctures whereby the possibility of Biden being succeeded by Harris — insert here any succession-drama storyboard from Shakespeare to Mario Puzo to Succession per the orgy of narrative warfare that’s been hacking events and dictating outcomes — is evidently to be neutralized at all cunning-stunt costs.

Could Biden put an immediate stop to all this uncertainty-fuelled intrigue by announcing his intentions tomorrow morning? Or perhaps on St. Patrick’s Day? Or maybe not before his upcoming trip to Canada so that every second question during the traditional Beavertails pool spray can be about whether he’s running again, providing colourful Canadian product placement for viral clips? Perhaps. But now that there seems to be a brief moratorium on off-the-record exposés on the hazards and indignities of Biden’s age (which, based on what he does in an average day, should really be about how 80 is the new 60) pending the deluge of them that will no doubt follow his big reveal, he’s got all the time in the world. Per The Guardian’s recent Doubts vanish as Democrats unite over Biden’s 2024 bid: ‘He will win’, Dante’s first circle may have been becalmed by the zombie balm of inevitability.

As was evident on January 6^th, 2021, Biden’s election in 2020 stalled a preposterous, dystopian shove into the replacement of American democracy with something far more amenable to China, far closer to the new model of surveillance-state authoritarianism and sufficiently brutal, unrecognizable and pathocratic to satisfy even the most unhinged grudge fathomable against democracy, America, voters, journalism and truth.

This is another 1968 moment, only more so. America is a house divided, not between Democrats and Republicans, but between pro- and anti-democracy interests. Joe Biden and most of the Democratic Party are on one side of that divide; the intelligence, political and geopolitical interests who’ve spent more than two decades undermining and hijacking the institutions of western democracies are on the other. America’s future is again under challenge.

So, not a peacetime context. Which makes Biden’s decision much more than personal. But based on everything everyone knows about Joe Biden, and barring any unknown unknowns, it may be — or may have been — no dilemma at all.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor and Deputy Publisher Lisa Van Dusen was a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.