Without Comment: Mr. Biden Withdraws His Candidacy for a 2nd Term in Office

 

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There s little to say; but there is something to read. The text of the letter speaks for itself. Text, though, like an organ, can project meaning through a number of stops of proportionately higher or lower pitch operated by one or more keyboard manuals. This, I suspect, is a textual organ with all stops or registered engaged. 

I leave it to others to speak to the politics of the aftermath. But one can only wonder from the perspective of the structural integrity of the system, and the alignment of that integrity, to the core premises on which the Republic maintains its authoritative solidity.  There have bee other moments that carry with them a whiff of the present--the most recent the toppling of the candidacy of Mr. Lyndon Johnson in 1968. Many of those in power were part of the generation, some of whom were instrumental in causing Mr. Johnson to reconsider. The result, of course produced  a key act in the theater of modernity--the election of Mr. Richard Nixon to the Presidency, and eventually a long period of turbulence that ended, in a way with the election of Mr. Reagan. Mr. Biden, one might suspect, continues to believe that he can be of service to the nation; but that is merely one factor in an equation of political objectification the solution to which, at this point, appears to require subtracting the incumbent from the equation.

I do not mean to suggest either Mr. Biden's action, or the circumstances that contributed to it, or the consequences that will be revealed in due course are good, bad, necessary or otherwise. No judgment here. Judgment is something that one would hope would be made, definitively, first by the members of the Democratic Party in Convention, and then by the general electorate.

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