Joe of good faith: Biden bows out

This episode of The Economist's podcast discusses the surprising decision of Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race and the implications for the Democratic Party and the upcoming election.

1. Joe Biden's unexpected withdrawal from the race has reshaped the Democratic Party's election strategy.
2. Kamala Harris, now the nominee, faces the dual challenge of uniting the party and proving her electability.
3. The episode highlights the strategic advantages and disadvantages of Harris's nomination.
4. Discussions about other potential Democratic candidates indicate a strong bench but underscore the urgency of party unity.
5. The episode reflects on Biden's long political career and his impact on American politics.

1: The Big Announcement

Joe Biden announces his withdrawal from the presidential race, surprising many, including his own team. The chapter discusses the immediate reactions and the strategic timing of the announcement. John Prideaux: "Joe Biden gave his aides one minute's notice that he was dropping out of the race."

2: Kamala Harris Steps Up

Kamala Harris is nominated as Biden's successor, inheriting the campaign's infrastructure and facing scrutiny over her track record and electability. John Prideaux: "She's the obvious pick as the sitting vice president... but she doesn't have a proven track record as an election winner on her own."

3: Democratic Contenders

This chapter examines the landscape of potential Democratic candidates who could challenge Harris for the nomination, emphasizing the depth of talent within the party. John Prideaux: "Democrats actually have a lot of talent... Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Andy Bashir, Jared Polis."

4: The Political Landscape

The discussion broadens to the challenges of running against Donald Trump and the potential for the Democrats to reclaim the presidency. John Prideaux: "He's incredibly polarizing... and so he ought to be beatable."

1. Stay informed about political developments to make educated voting decisions.
2. Engage in community and political discussions to foster informed debates.
3. Support political candidates who align with your values and vision for leadership.
4. Participate in voting and encourage others to exercise their democratic rights.
5. Reflect on the qualities of leadership that are important in high-stakes elections.

Joe Biden has at last succumbed to the pressure to step aside and has endorsed his vice-president, Kamala Harris. We ask how things should progress from this extraordinary moment. India could be better run if power were devolved from the national government. The solution? Create lots of new states (10:03). And remembering Dr Ruth, who taught America to talk about sex (17:34).

People

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Andy Bashir, Jared Polis, Rafael Warnock, Mark Kelly, Pete Buttigieg, Gina Raimondo

Content Warnings:

None

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Jason Palmer
The Economist.

Rosie Blore
Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist, I'm Rosie Blore. And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

India is the world's most populous country, since many of its states have more people than several european countries put together. Our correspondent makes the case for why Narendra Modi should create more local governments.

Jason Palmer
And our obituaries editor celebrates the life of Ruth Westheimer, better known as Doctor Ruth. For decades, she was America's giggling national sex therapist, loosening the country's puritanical collar and spreading both advice and wisdom on sexual health.

But first, for three weeks, Americas presidential race was gripped by one whether Joe Biden would continue as the Democrats presumptive nominee. His calamitous performance in the elections first debate cast into doubt his fitness for another term. Yet Mister Biden insisted time and again that he would press ahead. Until yesterday. Suddenly, he changed his mind.

John Prideaux
This was already the most turbulent presidential election campaign for decades, and its just been turned upside down again by Joe Bidens decision to quit the race. John Prideaux is our United States editor and hosts checks and balance, our show on american politics. It gives Democrats a second chance. Joe Biden was clearly behind Donald Trump now that they have a chance to get a candidate in place who can do better. But the party also has a pretty fine line to tread here.

A contest would be healthy, but Democrats don't have much time and party unity is pretty important. With the election only about 100 days away. Now, it wasn't so long ago that we were talking about the possibility that Mister Biden might concede. Have you been surprised by how long it ultimately took him? I have been surprised.

I was in the camp that I thought he had to go and that it would be good for the Democratic Party for him to go. And I was surprised it took him so long and then also quite surprised when it happened. And I say that because I thought we might get a little more notice. And it wasn't just a surprise for me. The reporting today suggests that Joe Biden gave his aides one minute's notice that he was dropping out of the race.

I assumed there might be an announcement that the president was making an Oval office address or an address from the Rose Garden. Instead, the letter just dropped on Twitter on a Sunday when political journalists like me were all just back from Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention was held. So it looked like Joe Biden was trying to run out the clock. But I just thought, you know, Jason, you and I talked after the debate performance. It was so bad.

I couldn't really see how they could go on with him as a candidate after that. And not so long after saying he was going to leave the race, Mister Biden nominated Kamala Harris as his successor. What do you make of that? I've got mixed feelings about it, Jason. On the one hand, I think he sort of had to.

And also, she starts with seniority. She's the obvious pick as the sitting vice president with the president leaving this late in the race. And she has the experience of having worked in the White House, the backing of some senior Democrats, and importantly, she inherits the Biden campaign machinery. But she doesn't have a proven track record as an election winner on her own. And so it's really hard to say at this point how strong a candidate she will be.

Jason Palmer
And what's your assessment of her chances as the nominee? Her chances are better than Joe Biden's chances were just by dint of the fact that she can credibly say, listen, I'm ready to serve another four years. And I think it was getting harder and harder for Joe Biden to make that argument. Her polling numbers over the past few weeks had improved to a point, or rather, Joe Biden's had deteriorated to a point where her numbers were a little bit better than his. That said, if you look at her political career, her trajectory, how she's got to this point, she's very much somebody who's come up through the inside game of politics, through California state politics.

John Prideaux
That's not necessarily great training for running in nationwide elections in 2020. When she did try and run nationwide in the democratic primary, her campaign was pretty bad and set against that. Starting from here, she's the person who could probably unite the party most quickly. And for Democrats who are keen on history making, she'd of course, be the first female president as well as the first woman of african and asian descent. Lots of people in the party feel that to pass over her would be wrong and might backfire politically.

And she's picked up some pretty important endorsements already, like those of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Nevertheless, I'm not sure it's the best thing for her candidacy just to be anointed and not face any challenges. So there should be, to your mind, an actual race for this nomination. Still, I think Kamala Harris would benefit from something of a contest, and the party would as well. The Democrats don't have a whole lot of time, only about three weeks or so, until they have to settle on their nominee at the party convention in Chicago in mid August.

But I'm just not sure coronation is a great look for Kamala Harris. I also think that candidates can sometimes look good or bad on paper, and the only way we really get to find out whether they're strong or not is by them running for president. I think it would help Kamala Harris to be seen to be challenged and to win on merit rather than win because she happens to be the person who's in pole position to stand. I also think that a contest would attract much needed attention to the Democratic Party. One of the things about running against Donald Trump is it's hard to wrest attention away from him.

I think a contest would help with that. So for all sorts of reasons, I think it would reinvigorate the Democratic Party, and it would be good for Kamala Harris even if she were to go on and win, as I suspect she probably would. And at this stage, who are the plausible runners and riders against her? Well, they're being a little bit shy, Jason, so it's hard to say at the moment, but Democrats actually have a lot of talent. That's been one of the strange things over the past couple of years when we've been discussing Joe Biden's candidacy and whether he ought to stand for a second term, despite being pretty old.

Some names would be Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania Andy Bashir, governor of Kentucky Jared Polis, governor of Colorado. Then in terms of the Senate, Rafael Warnock, who's a very charismatic preacher from Georgia, a former astronaut, Mark Kelly of Arizona. There are some good people in Joe Biden's cabinet, Pete Buttigieg, who listeners may remember from the 2020 primary, Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary. So there's a lot of talent there. And this is a question I've put to you before, but certainly time to ask it again.

Jason Palmer
Does any of them have a real chance against Donald Trump, given the chaos at this late stage of the election cycle? There's a nerdy answer to that that leans on polling, Jason, which is that Kamala Harris numbers are not so different from Joe Biden's. Perhaps you'd expect that. Right. It's the Biden Harris administration.

John Prideaux
It's hard for the vice president to separate herself from the president. And so looking at those numbers, they don't look great at the moment, but I think they could change with her at the top of the ticket. And then for the other Democrats, pollsters typically won't ask, would you vote for Donald Trump or Gretchen Whitmer in an election? Because Gretchen Whitmer doesn't have great name recognition and pollsters aren't super keen on asking hypotheticals. So we can't really answer that with polling data.

What I think you can say is that Donald Trump, despite his boost on the back of the convention and having survived an assassination attempt, he is not a very strong candidate. He lost the 2020 election. Republicans did poorly in 2022. He's incredibly polarizing. And so he ought to be beatable.

If the Democrats can get a good candidate in place, hes not some kind of political superhero. So I think Joe Biden was going to lose to Donald Trump. I think Democrats have a better chance now with somebody else at the top of the ticket. And without wishing to write a political eulogy here, whats your assessment of Mister Biden as he has chosen to bow out? Has he served America well?

I think you have to chop the answer to that up into bits. He had this extraordinarily long career in the Senate, first elected in 1972, which is bamboozling if you think about it. Think about what was going on in America at the time. That was pre Watergate and then as a vice president under Barack Obama, he was part of an administration that I think did a pretty good job in 2020. He beat Donald Trump.

I think he did the country and the world a favor there. And his administration has done some important things. Recovery from COVID the climate change legislation, investment in infrastructure, support for Ukraine. So that's a pretty good series of accomplishments. But if the democratic candidate loses to Donald Trump, I'm not sure how fondly that will be remembered.

I think what people will remember is he was a guy who should have bowed out the race a lot sooner. So I think his legacy depends a great deal on who wins this election in November. John, for now, thanks for that. I presume this is going to be a subject of forensic study on checks and balance this week. Yes, it sure will.

Thanks, Jason.

Jason Palmer
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Leo Morani
Governing a country of 1.4 billion people is always going to be a challenge. Leo Morani is Asia correspondent for the economist. Countries like India and China do do it, but they do it in different ways. India's way of doing it was to hand quite a lot of policy making power and administrative power to the states. In China, on the other hand, it's at a local level now.

India's system works pretty well, but India today has only 28 states. The biggest has some 240 million people. The one in which I live, the state of Maharashtra, has over 100 million people. And running the affairs of that many people just from one place, one capital, is a bit inefficient, let us call it. When you say that states have control over policies, what sort of policies are states actually controlling?

Healthcare, education, law and order is a state thing. The supply of welfare, the actual giving out of welfare is done by the states. The distribution of grain, for instance, agricultural policy, big chunks of it lie with the state. So we think of things like healthcare and welfare as actually national issues. Is your argument that the central government should be controlling these things?

On the contrary. So my argument and the argument of the sort of people who think about these things for a long time has been what India needs is more power at the level of municipalities, metropolitan regions. In fact, this is hardly new. India in the 1990s handed power to village councils and to municipalities, or at least our states, to do so. States proved reluctant to do so.

And so given that states are not going to be handing away any power, and given that many of them are quite large, the satisfying solution therefore becomes why not just make more states? Which is quite easy to do in India, as it turns out. Really? How do you make more states? Simple act of parliament.

That's it. When it comes to states, the central government, through acts of parliament, has unilateral authority without the permission of states to create new states, to extinguish existing ones, to change their borders, to change their names. Have there been any new states in. Recent years, many there have been new states. One state has been extinguished.

In the year 2000, India created three new states, all three from really big poor ones. And as recently as 2014, India created a new state called Telangana. And Telangana is a great example of how it helps to have new states. It started off as number ten in a ranking of per capita income. Today, ten years later, it is number three.

Rosie Blore
So how have they done this? It achieved this partly by virtue of being new. New states have a lot to prove. The people who were behind the movement for the formation of the state, you know, theyve been activists, theyve been protesting, but now theyre in government and they have to show that all of that was for something. Also, youre unburdened by policy baggage, so you can think fresh, you can really sort of do things differently.

Leo Morani
Thirdly, Telangana had the great fortune of having within its boundaries the city of Hyderabad. Hyderabad is a thriving modern city with a thriving tech scene. It has the world's biggest Amazon office. It has an enormous Microsoft office, an enormous Google office. It has a bunch of defense establishments.

It is India's farmer hub. So that certainly helped. But the fact is Hyderabad was always there, so they also made good use of it and were able to attract investment. So what did Telangana do differently? How did they make it a success?

So Telangana is in India's south and upon creation it became the only southern state without access to the coast. It's landlocked. They invested heavily in irrigation and power. These were big issues in the rural parts of the state, which is what also got them support for their movement. And they also had a welfare program for farmers.

All of these things have helped in the rural areas. Secondly, they reimagined how government permissions work. So in a lot of India, if you're a business, there's multiple departments and ministries you need to go to. And many indian states, they promised something called single window clearance. And yes, you go put your papers through a single window.

But then on the other side they're distributed again through multiple ministries. Right? Whereas here what Telangana did was something really interesting. They said if you, the business, have not heard back from us in 15 days, on the 16th day it is deemed to be cleared. So the pressure they put on themselves rather than making the investor run around between different ministries and whatnot.

Having said all of that, I should also say that it's not all positive. The focus on Hyderabad was quite heavy and as a result, the rural areas did not improve in their prosperity anywhere near as much as Hyderabad did. And there's quite a bit of disenchantment around the inequality in the state, which is why the guys who led the independent state movement, let us call it, who formed the first government formed the second government in elections late last year were booted out. And so now the new government that has come in from another party, it is up to them really to show, can this be sustained? Can Telangana continue being a role model or in fact an exemplar of why India should be creating new states?

Rosie Blore
So when I think about indian states, I guess I think about them as a launchpad for politicians. And of course, Modi himself was chief minister of Gujarat, and he used Gujarat as a launchpad for his national campaign. Would having more states create a more complex political environment? Absolutely. So this is one of the downsides of having more states.

Leo Morani
It would reduce the power of states at the center. So, for example, the undivided state of which Telangana was a part sent a huge contingent of members of parliament to Delhi. As two separate states, they send kind of middling amounts. The second thing is that Indias electoral cycles are not synchronized. So at any given time, somewhere or the other is going to be having an election.

If you have 100 states, nobody would do anything except campaigning. So you would need somehow to find a way to synchronize these cycles. Thirdly, the way indian states share resources is sometimes a matter of some controversy. Let us say there would have to be quite a lot of negotiating and horse trading and a delicate balance to ensure that everybody's happy. So, yes, there are complications, but I wouldn't necessarily call them downsides.

In fact, sorting out these complications could help make India as a whole function better because some of these things do have to be addressed. It sounds like a recipe for an enormous amount of discussion and possibly less action. Do you think we are actually going to see more states be formed? Are we going to see more states be formed in five years or ten years or 100 years? Yes to that.

An unequivocal yes, but I will wimply stop there and go on. Tell me about the next five years. And what will Modi do? Well, he is promising, his party is promising to reinstate the statehood of Kashmir. So I think thats one new state we might see at some point soon.

The most important thing to remember here is that nobodys talking about attacking the integrity or the unity of India. Were just talking about shifting around internal boundaries to make the place better run, more efficient, and in the end make Indians themselves better off, more comfortable and richer. Leo, thank you so much. Fascinated to see the economist arguing for more government, not less, which is our usual style. Well, more governments.

Rosie Blore
Right. Thank you very much for having me on, Rosie.

Ann Rowe
Not many people boast about being short, but Ruth Westheimer did. Ann Rowe is the economist's obituaries editor. She was only four foot seven when she was studying at the Sorbonne. She had to wait for a good looking guy to come along so that he could pop her up on the windowsill so that she could see the teacher. And whenever she appeared on an american talk show on tv, you could see her little feet swinging several inches above the ground.

There were plenty such talk shows because she became a real media star in America. It started when she began to notice that as she worked for Planned Parenthood and also did sex therapy sessions in her private clinic, she noticed how much people needed help with talking about sex. It seemed extremely difficult for Americans to articulate what they wanted, and so she thought it might be helpful if she made a radio program. She started one in 1980. A New York local radio station volunteered to take it.

It was called sexually speaking. It went out on Sunday nights just after midnight, and it lasted only 15 minutes, but it soon drew such an audience in that they lengthened it to an hour. And in the end, in 1984, she started doing the doctor Ruth show on tv, and that made her a national sensation.

He appeared a very great deal on the late night talk shows, and she did rather scandalize the hosts of the talk shows with very frank conversation. She once told David Letterman that she'd had a letter from a lonely elderly lady, a widow who had never tried masturbation, and how she had recommended to her that she ought to try a cucumber if she wanted to feel something in her vagina. And at that point, David Letterman simply got up and walked out, leaving Ruth in a state of high giggles sitting at the table. And she also persuaded Johnny Carson to admit that if masturbation really made you go blind, then he wouldn't have seen a thing since 1938. So she was a naughty and rather dangerous person to have on a show, always speaking her mind and speaking in the most wonderful german jewish american accent.

He'd been brought up in Germany and never, never lost it at all, and thought that, in fact, this was a selling point and made people all the more keen to talk to her because she sounded very grandmotherly, as if she was going to give you a bowl of chicken soup when instead she was going to tell you all about proper foreplay.

Sex was not her only subject. She never mentioned or very rarely, only when pushed to it. That she actually had quite a tragic background. After her upbringing in Germany, or ten years into it, when she was only ten and a half, her father was arrested by the Nazis. And at this, her mother and grandmother decided to send her away on the Kindertransport to Switzerland, where she was put into a children's home, which very rapidly became an orphanage because the parents of most of the children there were taken to the camps and gassed, and no more letters came for them.

After a while. He left as early as she could when she was 16 and went to Israel, feeling that after the war she wanted to embrace the cause of a new country and a new homeland for Jews. She was actually trained to be both, a sniper, which meant she could assemble and dismantle a submachine gun. And also she was taught to throw grenades. Every so often in interviews, she did raise this rather violent capacity with interviewers.

She always wanted people to treat her seriously. She might be short and she might be very funny, but she always had a serious cider and a dangerous side, too.

The other side that she didn't show so much was the side that had been brought up Orthodox Jewish, regularly gone to synagogue, but it showed in her very serious approach to the subject. She did want relationships to be long. She did want people who were not married to use contraception. He called herself old fashioned and a square. Matchmaking was fine with her.

It was very jewish, and she liked it for that.

And she had a whole sheaf of quotations from the Talmud up her sleeve. Her favorite one was a lesson given with humour is a lesson retained.

As she went into her eighties, she was still a character and still talking away on all kinds of shows about sex and about love, and not worried at all that she was now rather too old for it. She was still the acknowledged expert in the country. She did notice, however, that her short height was becoming even shorter, and she had lost a quarter of an inch in her old age. In her eighties, well, she thought she might lose height until she became more or less invisible. But you'd certainly go on hearing that wonderfully guttural german american jewish voice.

There was no doubt about that. I have sitting right next to me a very funny young man who has some wonderful observations on bachelor life. Welcome, Gerry. Thank you. Last time I told you that you have beautiful eyes.

Unknown
Now, I hoped that by this time you would be married, because I like people. Ann Rowe on Doctor Ruth Westheimer, who has died aged 96.

Jason Palmer
That's all for this episode of the intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

Ryan Reynolds
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