【中美创新时报2024 年 11 月 8 日编译讯】（记者温友平编译）周四，拜登总统走进阳光普照的玫瑰园，工作人员和内阁成员起立鼓掌，摘下飞行员太阳镜，并承诺做他的前任——现在也是他的继任者——没有为他做的事情。《波士顿环球报》记者Jim Puzzanghera 对此作了下述报道。
“我将履行总统的职责。我将履行我的誓言，我将尊重宪法，”拜登说，此时，附近就职游行观景台的施工声飘过白宫场地。“1 月 20 日，我们将在美国和平移交权力。”
这是拜登自大选以来的首次公开演讲，尽管他成为民主党同僚指责的焦点，指责副总统卡马拉·哈里斯惨败给当选总统唐纳德·特朗普。
拜登强烈暗示自己不会在 2020 年连任第二任期，却被指责为寻求连任第二任期，导致民主党初选大获全胜。拜登在 6 月的辩论表现糟糕之后，在三周多的时间里坚决抵制退出的压力，导致哈里斯只有大约 100 天的时间来推销自己的候选资格。拜登还指责自己因美国人对高物价的不满而导致工作支持率惨淡，拖累了哈里斯和民主党。
2020 年民主党总统候选人安德鲁·杨 (Andrew Yang) 在 X 上写道：“乔·拜登让我们所有人都陷入困境，民主党保护并支持他，直到为时已晚。”《新共和》高级编辑亚历克斯·谢泼德 (Alex Shephard) 写道：“哈里斯显然应该受到指责，但拜登应该承担更大的责任。”哈里斯的竞选顾问大卫·普洛夫 (David Plouffe) 在 X 帖子中暗示拜登是个问题，随后他删除了这篇帖子和他账户的其他内容，他写道：“我们从一个很深的坑里挖了出来，但还不够。”
这与 7 月份民主党人对拜登决定让位给哈里斯的感激之情相去甚远，在党代会上，民主党人高呼“谢谢你，乔”。
“任何时候，一个主要政党的候选人在普选中和选举人团投票中失利，就会出现互相指责的游戏，而拜登总统会发现自己处于困境，因为他这一年一直失误不断，”莱斯大学总统历史学家道格拉斯·布林克利 (Douglas Brinkley) 说。“他成了哈里斯脖子上的负担，而不是资产。”
布林克利称自己长期以来都是拜登的崇拜者，但他表示，拜登决定竞选第二任期，并声称自己是唯一能够击败特朗普的民主党人，这促使特朗普重返权力。
“他的遗产已经支离破碎，”布林克利说。
塞勒姆民主党众议员塞思·莫尔顿表示，特朗普的胜利有很多责任。其中一部分责任在拜登身上。
“毫无疑问，哈里斯副总统的竞选活动时间太短，这对她不利，即使最终哈里斯副总统当选总统，我们最好举行真正的初选，”莫尔顿说，他是 6 月辩论后第一批公开呼吁拜登退出竞选的国会民主党人之一。
他说，哈里斯也应该受到批评，因为她没有与拜登保持更远的距离。
“最大的问题是，这显然是一场变革性的选举，因为美国人对拜登感到失望，所以哈里斯在被选中接替他时需要做的第一件事就是与总统划清界限，”曾短暂竞选 2020 年民主党总统候选人提名的莫尔顿说。“她要做的最重要的事情就是立即表示，她会采取与乔·拜登不同的做法，但她却做了完全相反的事情。”
虽然民主党人认为，随着疫情后经济开放，通货膨胀飙升被不公平地归咎于拜登，但他们指责拜登没有更好地吹嘘自己所做的积极事情。
民主党人哀叹道，这意味着选民没有认识到历史性的就业增长和具有里程碑意义的立法等成就，这些立法旨在重建国家的基础设施，以及提高计算机芯片的生产和应对气候变化。
“我的民主党同僚们存在的一个问题是，民主党人认为成就不言而喻。他们不这么认为，”长期担任党内民意调查员的布拉德·班农 (Brad Bannon) 说。“我认为拜登和他的工作人员未能向选民推销他为振兴经济所取得的重大成就。”
拜登在周四的演讲中暗示了这一点，他赞扬了哈里斯的竞选活动，并感谢政府所有成员，称这是“历史性的总统任期”。
“我们所做的大部分工作已经被美国人民感受到了。绝大多数将……在未来 10 年内感受到，”他说。“只是现在才真正开始发挥作用。”
莫尔顿说，拜登政府未能适应特朗普从 2015 年开始改变的政治和媒体格局。
“他们通过了伟大的立法，与唐纳德·特朗普不同，他们没有为此大肆宣传。这应该足够了，但严酷的现实是，在今天的环境下，这显然不够，”他说。规则已经改变，民主党“显然不能仅靠礼貌取胜”。
“我认为我们不应该像特朗普和他的许多追随者那样，开始走遍美国，撒谎。但我们不能一直带着刀去枪战，争论刀刃是否在规定范围内，”莫尔顿说。
但民主党民意调查员安娜·格林伯格表示，在疫情造成的经济混乱之后，哈里斯正逆着全球反现任总统的潮流而动，“说这是拜登的错太容易了。”
“任何参选的人——拜登或其他任何人，与特朗普或其他任何人竞争——都可能面临这种逆风，”她说。
格林伯格也不相信公开的民主党初选会改变结果，称多名候选人之间的竞争可能会撕裂该党。她怀疑，如果拜登早点退出，哈里斯再多几个星期的竞选时间是否会产生重大影响。
“显然，如果拜登的工作支持率很高，而且每个人都认为经济状况很好，她可能会赢，”格林伯格说。不过，她说，除此之外，在民主党分析失败原因时，很难将失利的大部分责任归咎于拜登一个人。
拜登在玫瑰园演讲中没有提到这个问题。他无视记者大喊“总统先生，出了什么问题？”的问题，走回特朗普将于 1 月 20 日再次入驻的椭圆形办公室。周四晚些时候的新闻发布会上，当被问及拜登是否有任何遗憾时，白宫新闻秘书卡琳·让-皮埃尔说，她将把政治分析留给专家们。
“我们失望了吗？”她说。“当然。”
题图：拜登总统于 2024 年 11 月 7 日星期四在白宫玫瑰园发表讲话。ANNA ROSE LAYDEN/NYT
附原英文报道：
‘His legacy is in tatters’: Biden gets some of the blame as Democrats grapple with Trump’s victory
By Jim Puzzanghera Globe Staff,Updated November 7, 2024
President Biden speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House on Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024.ANNA ROSE LAYDEN/NYT
WASHINGTON — President Biden walked out to the sun-splashed Rose Garden on Thursday to a standing ovation from staffers and Cabinet members, took off his aviator sunglasses, and promised to do what his predecessor — now also his successor — did not do for him.
“I will do my duty as president. I’ll fulfill my oath and I will honor the Constitution,” Biden said as the sounds from the construction of the nearby inaugural parade viewing platform drifted across the White House grounds. “On January 20th, we’ll have a peaceful transfer of power here in America.”
In his first public address since the election, Biden took the high road even as he became the center of the blame game among fellow Democrats for Vice President Kamala Harris’s resounding loss to President-elect Donald Trump.
Blame for seeking a second term as the oldest president ever after strongly suggesting in 2020 he would not, short-circuiting a wide-open Democratic primary. Blame for defiantly resisting pressure for more than three weeks to drop out after his disastrous debate performance in June, leaving Harris only about 100 days to sell her candidacy. And blame for dragging her and the party down with his brutal job approval ratings stemming from Americans’ frustration with high prices.
“Joe Biden left us all out to dry and the Democratic Party protected and enabled him until it was too late,” 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang wrote on X. Alex Shephard, senior editor of The New Republic, wrote that “Harris obviously deserves blame here, but it’s Biden who deserves the greater share.” And Harris campaign adviser David Plouffe suggested in an X post, before deleting it along with the rest of his account, that Biden was a problem, writing, “We dug out of a deep hole but not enough.”
It’s all a long way from the outpouring of gratitude from Democrats in July for Biden’s decision to step aside in favor of Harris, epitomized by the thunderous chants of “Thank You, Joe” at the party’s convention.
“Anytime a nominee of a major party loses the popular and the Electoral College vote, there’s going to be a blame game, and President Biden finds himself in the hot seat because this has been a year of fumbles by him,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “He became an albatross around Harris’s neck, not an asset.”
Brinkley described himself as a longtime admirer of Biden but said his decision to run for a second term and assertion he was the only Democrat capable of defeating Trump helped lead to Trump’s return to power.
“His legacy is in tatters,” Brinkley said.
Representative Seth Moulton, a Salem Democrat, said there’s plenty of blame to go around for Trump’s victory. And some of it falls on Biden.
“There’s no question that Vice President Harris was handicapped by how short her campaign had to be and we would have been better off with an actual primary even if we did end up with Vice President Harris president at the end of the day,” said Moulton, who was one of the first congressional Democrats to publicly call for Biden to drop out of the race after the June debate.
He said Harris also deserves criticism for not distancing herself more from Biden.
“The biggest issue is that this was clearly a change election because Americans were frustrated with Biden, so the number one thing that Harris needed to do when she was selected to take over for him . . . is separate herself from the president,” said Moulton, who ran a short-lived campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. “The most important thing she had to do is immediately say she would do things differently than Joe Biden, and she did the exact opposite.”
And while Democrats believe Biden has been unfairly blamed for a spike in inflation as the economy opened up after the pandemic, they fault him for not doing a better job of bragging about the positive things he did.
That meant voters didn’t recognize accomplishments such as historic job growth and landmark legislation to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, as well as boost its production of computer chips and address climate change, Democrats lamented.
“One of the problems with my fellow Democrats is that Democrats believe accomplishments speak for themselves. They don’t,” said longtime party pollster Brad Bannon. “And I think Biden failed, and his staff failed, in selling the significant accomplishments he made to revitalize the economy to the voting public.”
Biden hinted that himself in his speech on Thursday as he praised Harris for her campaign and thanked all the members of his administration for what he called “an historic presidency.”
“Much of the work we’ve done is already being felt by the American people. The vast majority will . . . be felt over the next 10 years,“ he said. “It’s just only now, just really kicking in.”
The Biden administration failed to adjust to the changed political and media landscape that Trump ushered in starting in 2015, Moulton said.
“They passed great legislation, and unlike Donald Trump, they didn’t jump up and down being self-promoters about it. That should be enough, but the harsh reality is that it’s clearly not in today’s environment,” he said. The rules have changed and Democrats are “clearly not winning by just being polite.”
“I don’t think that we should start going all over America, lying through our teeth like Trump and many of his followers do. But we can’t keep bringing knives to a gunfight and arguing about whether the blades are within regulation or not,” Moulton said.
But Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg said that Harris was swimming against an anti-incumbent tide around the world after the economic disruptions caused by the pandemic, and that “it’s too easy to say it’s Biden’s fault.”
“Anybody who ran — Biden or anybody else, against Trump or somebody else— would likely be facing that headwind,” she said.
Greenberg also isn’t buying that an open Democratic primary would have changed the results, saying a competition among multiple candidates could have ripped the party apart. And she’s dubious that a few more weeks for Harris to campaign had Biden dropped out sooner would have made a significant difference.
“Obviously if Biden had terrific job approval numbers and everyone thought the economy was great, she probably would have won,” Greenberg said. Short of that, though, it’s hard to put too much of the loss on Biden alone as Democrats analyze the reasons for the loss, she said.
Biden didn’t address the issue in his Rose Garden speech. He ignored a reporter’s shouted question of “Mr. President, what went wrong?” as he walked back to the Oval Office that Trump will once again occupy on Jan. 20. Asked at a news briefing later Thursday if Biden had any regrets, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said she would leave the political analysis to the pundits.
“Are we disappointed?” she said. “Of course.”
