The seesaw battle for the soul of the Democratic Party is finally over. A long three weeks after Joe Biden’s debate debacle against Donald Trump, with scores of party leaders and big-time donors expressing zero confidence in his physical ability to endure the rigors of the campaign trail, our 46th president has called it quits.
It wasn’t easy for Biden to reach this decision. By nature, he is a relentless crusader on behalf of America’s working class. His Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is the among the most historic pieces of legislation since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society victories in the 1960s. But at 81 years old, Biden — who refused to take a cognitive test — has reached the end of the line. The Democratic Party’s burden of derailing Trump’s backward-looking isolationism, nativism and racial divisiveness takes a Democratic nominee with the stamina to deliver five energetic speeches a day. This rule does not apply to Trump: He is a MAGA cult leader with his own Truth Social network at his disposal in a nanosecond.
Biden himself prepared us for this moment four years ago, when he selected Kamala Harris as his running mate.
It couldn’t have been easy for Biden to reach this decision, because, as he’s said many times, he really has proven how to get “Big Deal” beneficial things done for America’s middle class. But now, after much hand-wringing and fretting over abysmal approval ratings, Biden has returned to his previous 2020 political position. “Look,” he said then, “I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”
That future is now. But Biden himself prepared us for this moment four years ago, when he selected Kamala Harris as his running mate. As Trump and his campaign deployed racist dog whistles, Biden chose a brilliant 59-year-old California woman with a Jamaican-born economics professor for a father and an India-born research scientist for a mother. Countering Trump’s innate sexism and lawlessness, Biden recognized and valued the incisive intelligence Harris had honed as a courtroom prosecutor, district attorney, attorney general and senator. Now Vice President Harris must use those skills to send Trumpism writ large into history’s dustbin.
Everyone who truly knows Harris, not the media, knows she is brilliant and an empathetic voice for social justice. The vice president’s family — as recounted in her excellent memoir, “The Truths We Hold” — is part of the great American immigrant success story. When Trump said at a 2023 New Hampshire rally that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” Harris’ response came swift and hard. “It is language meant to divide us,” she said later the same day, likening Trump’s vitriol to “the language of Hitler.”
Born in Oakland, California, in 1964, Harris was raised in college towns in the Midwest before graduating from high school in Quebec. She then returned to America and attended Washington, D.C.’s prestigious Howard University before she resettled in her birth state for law school. After graduation, Harris became a prosecutor and was eventually elected San Francisco’s district attorney in 2003. Over the next dozen years, she worked her way up to elected posts as the state’s attorney general and then its junior senator. Columnist Joe Mathews put his own spin on it: “Is there any better preparation for running a country … than a political career in a state as crazy as California?”
Harris arrived on the national scene in tumultuous political times, entering the Senate just as Donald Trump entered the White House. As Trump’s presidency opened floodgates of right-wing activism across the land, she earned a reputation as one of the Senate’s most forceful interrogators, skewering the likes of Attorney General William Barr and Supreme Court nominee (now Justice) Brett Kavanaugh. When Joe Biden selected her as his running mate four years ago, he was already thinking about the next chapter of her history, and of America’s. Donald Trump and the Electoral College had denied America its first female president in 2016. But Biden’s endorsement of Harris once again opens the White House door to finally have America’s first female president.
The passing of the Democratic Party leadership to Harris has come earlier than our 46th president had hoped. But Biden — the inveterate institutionalist, strategist and political fighter — had set up his heir apparent in advance: Kamala Harris.
Countering Trump’s innate sexism and lawlessness, Biden recognized and valued the incisive intelligence Harris had honed as a courtroom prosecutor, district attorney, attorney general and senator.
Extending his presidential legacy was the motivation for Andrew Jackson in the early 1830s. On track for easy re-election, Jackson proposed that after he won he would immediately resign, leaving the top job to his vice presidential running mate, the personable Martin Van Buren. Devoid of any imperial attitude toward the presidency, Jackson considered it as just another job, in which withdrawal or resignation due to changing circumstances could and should be commonplace. Only when Martin Van Buren balked on minor grounds did Jackson abandon his plan.
By the time President Franklin D. Roosevelt chose a new running mate in 1944, he’d been in office 12 years. As with Biden, his focus was innately on the future, and self-awareness of his own ill health must certainly have had him thinking of a potential successor. His ultimate choice, Sen. Harry S. Truman of Missouri, may have been fairly obscure, but no one knew better than Roosevelt what the job of the presidency required. And when Truman ascended to the office upon Roosevelt’s death in 1945, his instinct was borne out. Today, Truman is regarded as one of the very best presidents in U.S. history.
Another member of that august group, President Dwight Eisenhower, was keenly aware that a president’s job included setting up a strong bench of future leaders. Though popular with his party and the electorate during his first term, the 66-year-old Eisenhower wasn’t convinced that he remained the man for the job. In a letter to his personal physician, he used a football analogy to explain why: A good quarterback, he wrote, “may have all of the wisdom to be derived from years of experience in the game. But when the need arises, he has to throw himself unreservedly into the play. … If we merely needed a brain on the field, a quarterback could play if he had to be in a wheelchair; but that isn’t true in his case, nor is it in the presidency.” Ike elaborated on this theme in his diary, noting that there is a “greater likelihood that a man of 70 will break down under a load than a man of 50” and that to win, his party needed top-tier candidates “in positions of the highest responsibility so as to symbolize … youth, vigor.” A decade later, facing the prospect of a re-election campaign in 1968, President Lyndon Johnson worried not so much about his age as about his own unpopularity’s dragging his party to defeat. Announcing his decision not to seek a second term, he framed the campaign horse race as a distraction from the real work of governing. “With America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day,” he said, “I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes, or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office.” For four years now, Vice President Harris has been in the trenches fighting against right-wing populist forces challenging America’s future here at home and abroad. During her term, Harris has traveled extensively, visiting 21 countries on missions ranging from humanitarian to military. She was a point person for the administration on immigration, on climate and on women’s right to health care and reproductive freedom. Sometimes studious, sometimes vivacious, she has emerged as the very antithesis of Trump. Harris and Trump now offer voters the starkest political contrast in U.S. campaign history since 1860. Where Harris is rational, Trump is bombastic. By virtue of Harris’ legal training, she instinctively deals in facts. Former President Trump is a showman extraordinaire who doesn’t let truth get in the way of scoring a shazam moment. Where she’s compassionate, he is often the bully of the bully pulpit. Make no mistake, though, Harris can be the toughest presence in any room. But being combative in one-on-one political showdowns — like she was with Kavanaugh and Barr — isn’t her default modus operandi. In an old-fashioned but multicultural 21st century way, Harris is an avatar of Duty, Honor and Country. A vote for Kamala Harris this November, in essence, is a vote for the legacy of Joe Biden.
Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown chair in humanities and professor of history at Rice University and a board member of the National Archives Foundation. 
