Please, President Biden, pass the torch

Dear Mr. President,

I have been a fan and a supporter of yours for a very long time — since your earliest efforts at running for the presidency in 1988 and 2008.

One cannot say this about too many of our presidents, but you are a genuine American hero. Not only because you chose to run in the 2016 election cycle after the Klan/Nazi rally in Charlottesville to help save the soul of America, but also once elected, you rose to the occasion, and became a much better president than anyone, including your fans, could have expected.

Those who are anchored in the real world understand full well that the wisdom you derived from your years of policymaking experience helped speed our recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Those who live in the real world of facts, rather than ideologically motivated propaganda also understand that the wisdom you derived from your decades of experience and your ability to still work the corridors of Congress to secure needed policy changes has led us to seriously address the repair of our infrastructure and, equally important, focus investment on new technology and new jobs for the new economy.

Your opponents want to dig and drill in a desperate effort to cling to the old-world economy.

You have been the most effective president in my lifetime, certainly since the days of LBJ’s revolutionary civil rights legislation and the Great Society that brought Medicare to our elderly and Medicaid to low-income Americans. Your record may be as consequential as, perhaps, FDR’s New Deal.

And you took on the task — with all the disgusting, personal abuse that was to be involved by your vulgar opponent — of saving our country from a regime of European style authoritarianism. When the history of this period is written, and if our democracy survives, your heroism will be a large part of that story.

I have little doubt that with the wisdom you have derived over the years of congressional and administrative experience, you are the most qualified person to serve as president. Sadly, however, you are not the best person to run for president.

It is time to pass the torch to a new generation, as JFK said about his following Eisenhower. And enough about your need to “finish the job.” The job has no end. There will always be new problems, new crises and new opportunities to address. You temporarily hold symbols of power that, by the legitimacy of democratic elections, are passed to the next person who has the authority to grab it or drop it.

Please do not insult us by continuing to repeat that “you had a bad night.” What the public saw, including the public that admires you so much, was not a bad night, but the ravages of time.

No one is going to push you out; no one has the power to do that. That would also be a mortal blow to party unity. Rather, people are imploring you to see that it is time to recognize the limitations that come with the aging process.

People are not asking you simply to designate the vice president as your successor. That too would split the party, though she is clearly qualified and ready for the job.

What is needed in the few days that are remaining is a lively debate about personal qualities and policy visions that allow the delegates in Chicago to select the party’s nominees.

The election is a little more than 100 days away; the nomination process has to be concluded sooner than that.

As you have repeatedly said, the stakes are high — not only for the people of our country, but also for the people of Europe since the platform of your opponents is essentially to switch sides and support Putin’s brutal war on the civilian population of Ukraine.

If you begin the process that will ignite excitement in the party and country by announcing that you will not accept the nomination, you will be forever an American hero.

If there is any hubris on your part that has you anchored you in your insistence that you have a capacity to run and win a national campaign once again — and then your loss ushers in an American style dictatorship the likes of which we have never seen in this country — the judgement of history and your fellow Americans will not be kind.

There are millions of people who are grateful for what you have accomplished. But now is the time for the supreme patriotic act of saving our democracy by passing the torch.

Howard L. Simon served as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida from 1997 through 2018. He is now president of Clean Okeechobee Waters Foundation Inc.