President Joe Biden has given every indication that he’s all-in for a re-election run next year, but there are some people that believe that it’s still possible the president could end up dropping out of the race.
One of those people is someone who might know more than others – Franklin Foer, a biographer who has written a book about the first two years of the Biden administration.
Foer appeared on the “Meet the Press” program on NBC recently, and host Chuck Todd asked him if he’d be surprised if Biden ended up deciding that he didn’t want to return to the White House in 2024. Foer, whose book is set to be released soon, said it “wouldn’t be a total shock” if Biden decided to bail out of the race by the end of this year.
As he said:
“I would say it would, it would be a surprise to me. But, it wouldn’t be a total surprise.
“When he talks about his life, he uses this word, fate, constantly. Joe Biden is a very religious guy, and fate is a word loaded with religious meaning. And he always talks about it, ‘He can’t say where fate goes.’
“And so I always, when I hear that, to me, it’s the ellipses in the sentence when he’s talking about his own future.”
While many people questioned whether Biden was going to run for re-election – and whether he even should, considering his age and the fact that most believe he’s done a poor job in the White House thus far – he announced earlier this year that he would do so. He also has given no indication that dropping out was even a possibility.
That being said, Biden is already the oldest person to ever serve as president. Plus, there are many prominent politicians – including some within his own party – who believe Democrats would be better served by another candidate.
While the calls for Biden to step aside have subsided in recent months, it’s not as if they’ve gone away completely. In fact, it’s possible that the calls haven’t increased in frequency because there isn’t a really viable alternate candidate among liberals.
For his part, Foer said the book that is being released this week, called “The Last Politician,” talks about how Biden believes he’s “underestimated,” and how he has tried to use that to his own advantage.
It further delves into the president’s political career, specifically in regard to making policy and techniques that he has used to accomplish things.
As the author described:
“It doesn’t take Bob Woodward to understand that Joe Biden is old, and I’m not a gerontologist and I can’t predict how the next couple of years will age Joe Biden.
“I think what my book does is shows that he is somebody who, for whom – he’s buried in details. He’s somebody who is very technocratic, really obsessed with the intricacies of policy. He’s a very activist president in that he micromanages a lot of the dealings of the White House.”
