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Ruby:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

With just over a hundred days to go until the US election, President Joe Biden has announced he’s dropping out of the race.

In a letter posted to X, he said “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term”.

Biden’s announcement comes after weeks of intensifying pressure from donors and colleagues concerned he was facing certain defeat by Trump.

The question now is whether the Democrats will unite around Kamala Harris, President Biden’s pick for his successor.

Today, senior fellow at the United States Studies Centre Bruce Wolpe, on the key players who pushed Biden out and whether Kamala Harris can win.

It’s Tuesday, July 23.

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RUBY:

Bruce. Hello. Welcome back to 7am.

Bruce:

Wonderful to be here. Thank you so much.

RUBY:

Ever since that disastrous first debate against Trump, Biden has been under this intense and growing pressure to step aside. Yet he and his inner circle, they have seemed completely immovable until this moment. So, why did he cave now?

Bruce:

You're exactly right and so, this all happened on Sunday in the United States. Well, Sunday morning was a continuation of the fierce reporting that Biden was angry, he was resentful, he wasn't going anywhere. He had announced he was going to campaign in this coming week. He felt betrayed. He felt under appreciated, and he hated it. He said, I am the nominee. I was in the primaries. I won millions of votes, got all the delegates. And you're telling me I can't be the nominee of our party?

Audio excerpt – Joe Biden:

“Look, I’m not a young guy. That’s no secret. But here’s the deal: I understand how to get things done for the American people.”

Bruce:

He entered the 2020 presidential campaign to do one thing: stop Donald Trump.

Audio excerpt – Joe Biden:

“Donald Trump believes the job of the president is to take care of Donald Trump.”

Bruce:

He said in 2024, I'm the best to stop Donald Trump.

Audio excerpt – Joe Biden:

“I know him well, and I know the danger he presents to our democracy. And we’ve been down this road before.”

Bruce:

And so for him to be denied that opportunity when he fervently believed he was the best, he didn't believe the polls, he didn't believe the material the people were bringing him. But the key thing to watch in this were about 5 or 6 pivotal people: President Obama, President Clinton, the former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who is the most cunning and revered strategist that the Democrats have, the leader of the House Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat, and the majority leader in the Senate Chuck Schumer, and the most prominent black representative in Congress Jim Clyburn, whose support for Biden in 2020 sealed his nomination and ultimately his victory. And most of them, Clyburn aside, were hearing from their members that, we're dead. We will go down with him. Trump will win. He will win control of Congress. He will have an unfettered hand to rule with an iron fist. And we can't let this happen. All these leaders ultimately met with Biden and finally there was a realisation, by the president and his staff, who's been loyal with him for decades and who are excellent, that this is over. He's going to lose, and it's going to be a catastrophe for the Democratic Party. And ultimately, he had to accept it.

RUBY:

And it's not just Biden's Democratic colleagues that have been losing faith in him, is it? It's donors as well. How critical has that fact been for Biden?

Bruce:

Well, if you're in a jet plane, you need fuel. And when the fuel runs out, you crash. And, yeah, when George Clooney says, I'm not doing any more money for you, well, that gets everyone's attention.

Audio excerpt – News Reporter (CNBC):

“Disney heiress Abigail Disney withdrawing her support, telling CNBC yesterday that she plans to stop all donations as long as the president remains the frontrunner.”

Bruce:

What's really interesting is in the first hours of Kamala Harris saying that she is running, tens and tens of millions of dollars, from small dollar contributors, has flown in. So yes, money is the mother's milk of American politics and it was pretty important.

RUBY:

And Joe Biden, he's endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, and she has said that her intention is to earn and win this nomination. So what does that process actually look like?

Bruce:

We’ve never been here before, so we don’t have a clear definition of it. It's unprecedented. You know, I get tired of saying how unprecedented we are in these unprecedented times, but no major party's candidate for president has dropped out of a presidential race this close to the election throughout American history. A lot depends on who else enters the race and wants to get the nomination and I think the party will probably set up some events around the country where whoever is contesting the nomination will have debates or town halls or whatever, so you get a sense of them and how they're doing.

But, question is, do you have a sort of clean process or a messy process, where some people get in a race and they say “I don't want Kamala Harris, you got to stick with me” and you divide the party. Now, I think at the end, given the stakes involved, that the party will work a process that finds itself coalescing around Kamala Harris in the Democratic convention, which begins August 19th.

RUBY:

After the break, can Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump?

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RUBY:

Bruce, if, as you're predicting, the whole party does get behind Kamala Harris without this traditional nomination process playing out, does that leave the Democrats open to criticism that they're acting undemocratically?

Bruce:

Yes it could, and I think that we got a little flavour of that today. President Obama made public a letter to the American people on Joe Biden's presidency. And it was really high praise for what Biden and his legacy will be. And then people are saying, oh, he didn't endorse Kamala Harris. Does that mean he's not for Kamala Harris? And I think two things. First, that President Obama being the man that he is, understands that this is a day for Joe Biden. This is a day for honouring his presidency. And that if he had endorsed Kamala Harris in the same breath, well, then that inside baseball deal would be apparent. They all conspired, it's all in, it was all a plot. And so I think there will be some distance between what happened today with President Biden and other very prominent people coming in to support her.

RUBY:

And we know that the Trump campaign, they've already been preparing for a race against Kamala Harris. Tell me about what their line of attack against her will be.

Bruce:

With Kamala Harris, they'll attack her as a radical extremist, communist, deep state type person. The very figurine that they hate. They're going to go after her appearance, her voice, how she talks, her mannerisms and so forth. But there are a couple things here. She's a prosecutor. She was district attorney in San Francisco to attorney general of the state of California. She goes after criminals. Well, guess what? Trump is a convicted felon. She's going to attack him and he hasn't faced that kind of criticism from the Democratic nominee throughout this campaign. Effective criticism, a criticism that sticks. And I think she will make every effort to make it stick. The other thing about Trump is, I don't think he has high regard for women. Women that have been prominent and powerful, he attacks. He calls Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, Crazy Nancy. If you're a prominent anchor at Fox News, he says horrific things about you. The same about journalists at MSNBC. And so I think a woman of colour presents a really rich target for him to denigrate. And in Australia, we've learned, from Julia Gillard over ten years ago, what can happen to a woman who becomes, who contests the position.

RUBY:

And it was Biden's debate performance that really led us to this moment. So will we see another debate against Trump and if so, how would Kamala Harris perform against him?

Bruce:

She is a debater, she was in the Senate for many years, so I think she has all the attributes to do it. She also has a wealth of experience from being vice president for almost four years. She’s in all the meetings, she goes overseas on missions for him. I think she's underestimated. And in politics, you always want to be underestimated. On the other hand, if she makes bloopers, if she missteps, and in her early days as vice president, she was not effective in the media. She was uneasy, she had staff churn. She was weak on immigration, she didn't establish her mandate over that. But she's evolved. She has grown as vice president. When Florida passed a really restrictive, a six week ban on abortions, she went immediately on the day after the legislature did that and she confronts the governor, confronts the voters in Florida. It was a stunning coup.

Audio excerpt – Kamala Harris:

“This is a fight for freedom. The fundamental freedom to make decisions about one’s own body and not have their government tell them what they’re supposed to do.”

Bruce:

When there's a massacre, gun massacre in schools, she goes there and says, why are we doing this? Aren't we better than this?

Audio excerpt – Kamala:

“So part of why I'm here today is to challenge every state: pass the red flag law.”

Bruce:

So I think she has that ability and we'll see it. I don't know whether Trump actually wants to debate Kamala Harris, because there's only one way that can go. I think he'd probably be afraid of debating her, and I think he doesn't want to give her too much prominence and attention. In other words, who's this election going to be a referendum on, on Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? If it's on Kamala Harris, she'll probably lose. If it's on Trump, the Democrats will probably win.

RUBY:

Yeah, I think it's fair to say that until this moment, Harris has been in Biden's shadow, her approval ratings, they're weak and there is a lot of uncertainty around whether she can actually meet this challenge. Even if she does run the absolute best version of her campaign, I still wonder if she can win against Trump, because it seems unlikely right now that anyone could. With less than four months to go, Trump has never seemed stronger.

Bruce:

That's exactly right. And if you look at the swing states, they've been going hard towards Trump since the debate. And that's trouble. On the other hand, what Biden was suffering from was a lack of enthusiasm. Now, I think, Harris can regenerate a lot of enthusiasm, particularly younger voters, I think among black voters, among women, among some Hispanic Americans. And so she has a chance to get some ground back. It's uphill, absolutely.

RUBY:

So as we speak, Kamala Harris is on the brink of making history. She would be the first woman of colour to be a presidential nominee, and if she were to win, she would be the first female president. Do you think that those facts about her have the power to galvanise voters, that Harris is someone who can convince people, enough people, to turn out and to vote for her?

Bruce:

I think the next month is really crucial in that regard. If she has a good performance, she brings the party together. If she gets enthusiastic crowds in groups of Americans who were not going to vote for Joe Biden, then the answer is yes. Trump is not going to lose any of his voters, the question is, can she accumulate enough voters to outvote those guys, just as Biden did, you know, 7 million votes in 2020. So, to be seen. But it's going to be really interesting.

RUBY:

Bruce, thank you so much for your time.

Bruce:

Thank you so much. It's only the future of the free world. We'll see how we go.

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Also in the news today...

Tens of millions of dollars in donations continue to flow into the Democrats campaign coffers, as backers show support for Kamala Harris as the preferred candidate.

Harris raised over 27.5 million US dollars in just the first five hours of her campaign on Sunday. By night time that figure had grown to nearly 50 million.

According to fundraising platform Act Blue, the donations are largely coming from small-dollar or grassroots supporters.

VP Kamala Harris also stands to inherit around 96 million US dollars in President Biden’s campaign fund.

And,

Australia is one of several nations to respond to the weekend’s landmark ICJ ruling, which found that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is in violation of international law.

The ruling marks the first time the ICJ has handed down an advisory opinion on the legality of Israel’s occupation of the Gaza strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem. The ruling called for Israel to end its occupation and that its obligated to pay reparations for the harm caused.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong said in a statement the government is carefully considering the ICJ ruling and said they want to see concrete steps taken to end the settlement.

Over the weekend, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the court’s ruling a quote, “decision of lies”.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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