EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK: To protect democracy, we need to back Biden

Featured photo: President Joe Biden speaks at NC&AT on April 14, 2022 (photo by Carolyn de Berry)

I know what you’re thinking.

I would rather vote for a soggy piece of toast than cast my vote for Joe Biden, again.

I hear you. After seeing clips from the now infamous June 27 presidential debate, it is hard to root for Biden, who is not all that convincing and appears to be in declining health.

But I’m begging you, please, don’t jump off this ship.

In the hours, days and even weeks after the debate, mainstream media hasn’t shut the hell up about how Joe Biden is unfit to serve as president and how he should step down. It’s like we’re back in 2016. Remember when CNN and all of the political pundits and the New York Times ran all those distraction articles about Hillary Clinton’s emails? And how that led to her defeat and the subsequent rise of Donald Trump? And then do you remember how we had four years of reign by a tyrannical, misogynist fascist who worked to overturn Roe v. Wade? Remember?

Well it’s happening again.

I know voting for Biden isn’t really many people’s cup of tea. It’s certainly not mine. But asking, demanding him to step down or entertaining the idea that someone else could come in at this point in the campaign cycle and run as president is absurd. It’s lunacy.

What we need to do now is quell the calls and vote for Biden. Because the alternative, frankly, is kind of unimaginable. And as people have been saying all along, we’re voting for a platform, not just a single person. Do you know what the platform for the other side is? Have you heard of Project 2025? Because that’s what will happen. I’m not being overdramatic. 

Political power players have been laying the groundwork for a Christian, white-nationalist ethnostate for years, and if Donald Trump is elected president again in November, we’re on a clear path to a very calculated kind of hell for most of us.

The Supreme Court ruling in favor of Trump, giving him — and all other future presidents — immunity is just one step in this direction. There are many more in the works.

So yeah, voting for Biden may not be your first or second or third choice. But it’s the one we’ve got. And it’s the only option given that the other side literally wants to demolish democracy.