THE DEMOCRATS KICK A GIFT HORSE IN THE ARSE

 

7/22/24

 

The media are making President Biden’s decision to forgo running for re-election look like an event that will enter the annals of history on the same page as LBJ’s decision to not run in 1968 or FDR’s opposite decision in 1944, which was, come to think of it, a much closer analogy, but I digress.    Yes, Mr. Biden’s deciding to leave was a big deal, and certainly drew yours truly’s attention for most of yesterday, but didn’t we all see it coming?   As Brook Benton would have put it, it was just a matter of time after the continuing series of “bad nights” Mr. Biden suffered after the debacle of a debate that threw Mr. Biden’s campaign into chaos. 

 

What made yesterday interesting, even historic, time may tell, was the Democrats’ reaction to the gift Mr. Biden had given them.   They were given the chance to run a fresh, new candidate against the eminently beatable Mr. Trump.   As I have written repeatedly and continually (See my 7/10/24 post, my 7/1/24 post, and the much earlier posts linked to the latter.), both former President Trump and Mr. Biden should be, or would have been, easy to beat.   While the GOP, as is its custom, blew it, Mr. Biden gave his perhaps his greatest gift to those who have embraced him for decades:  a near assurance of victory in 2024.   But what did the Democrats do?   They, as of this writing, have coalesced behind the only candidate, outside the Party’s loony left and/or the pool of potential candidates encumbered with copious quantities of personal and/or political baggage, who still could lose this election to Mr. Trump.   This is the political equivalent of putting a winning lottery ticket through a shredder.  It has long been said that there are two parties in this country, the evil party and the stupid party.   It looks as though the stupid party has found a companion in its ineptitude.

 

Some of you will doubtless wonder what I am talking about.   Isn’t Mr. Trump’s victory inevitable after the assassination attempt and the vastly entertaining, reportedly highly successful, and somewhat odd convention in Milwaukee?    (The convention is perhaps grist for a latter mill.)

 

No.

 

Those of us who have been watching politics for a long time realize that the positive afterglow of things like assassination attempts and successful conventions is as ephemeral as the life a post-copulation praying mantis.   Ronald Reagan’s popularity soared in the aftermath of the attempt on his life in the third month of his presidency.   But his ratings plummeted soon afterward, costing the GOP big in 1982.   Fortunately for the Republicans, and the country, Mr. Reagan recovered politically by 1984, but the assassination attempt was a minor, at best, factor in that race.  Both parties routinely get honeymoons after their conventions, but they wilt as quickly as a rose purchased at a truck stop on an Interstate.   The same is happening to Mr. Trump.   His numbers improved after the attempt on his life and the GOP convention, but that could as easily be attributed to Mr. Biden’s incompetence and the growing awareness thereof as to any newfound enthusiasm for Mr. Trump in the eyes of the electorate.   Even now, few polls show Mr. Trump getting over 50% of the vote nationally or even in the contested states in which he had opened a lead over Mr. Biden.   His leads in all but a few of the battleground states, most of which were already at or near the margin of error, are tightening now that Mr. Biden is out of the electoral picture.

 

Mr. Trump looked like a winner when Joe Biden was his opponent.   Now that Mr. Biden is gone, it is going to be much tougher for Mr. Trump to move back into the White House.   Put another way, Mr. Biden could and, in all likelihood would, lose, but Mr. Trump couldn’t win by any means other than default.  The pundits on the right who tell you otherwise know this; that is why they were so eager to keep Mr. Biden in the race.   Against just about any other Democrat (and, as yours truly wrote in my last post, the more generic the candidate the better for the Dems), Mr. Trump is in trouble…except, maybe, if he runs against Vice-President Harris; Mr. Trump has a chance to win by default against her, the same way he would have won against Mr. Biden.

 Why is Ms. Harris a bad choice for the Dems?   Besides being too far to the left for the liking of most voters, she carries with her the burden of Mr. Biden’s policies, especially his border policies, for which she, at least according to the current White House, bears special responsibility.   Ms. Harris does not show signs of being overly intelligent, in tune with what is going on (much like her boss), or interested in the issues of government.   Check out her explanation of the Ukraine situation:

 “Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine so basically that’s wrong.”

Ms. Harris was not talking to first graders at the time, but it is often hard to escape the notion that she considers us all first graders.    She gives the impression of being a very silly person whose infatuation with herself makes even life-long politicasters look self-effacing.  

All that having been written, Ms. Harris retains a better chance of beating Mr. Trump than did her boss.   The media machine has been running full blast for at least the last few months, telling us how, after a “rough start,” Ms. Harris has shown signs of being a capable leader and a notable statesman, or, as she would put it, statesperson.   They speak of her newfound eloquence and seriousness.   And this drumbeat will continue until election day.    She retains Mr. Biden’s two key issues:  

 

·         Mr. Trump is an enemy of democracy who will do all sorts of ghastly things he somehow never got around to doing in his first term, and

·         Mr. Trump hates women and hence will ban abortion but the Democrats will enshrine and protect a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.

 

And a lot of her potential for success turns on Ms. Harris’s selection of a running mate.   The Republicans have already made a poor choice in this arena.   Rather than selecting somebody who has a chance of bringing in groups of voters who could push Mr. Trump over the 50% line, Mr. Trump has chosen as his running mate a man whose appeal is limited to voters who would, under no circumstances whatsoever, consider supporting anybody but Donald Trump.  J.D. Vance is a great selection if the goal is to make a point that has already been made; he is a terrible selection if the goal is to win an election.  

 

Ms. Harris, on the other hand, could go in the opposite direction and reach to the center.   Already, talk has swirled around several of the names mentioned in my July 10 post as possible alternatives to Mr. Biden:  Andy Beshear, Roy Cooper, and Josh Shapiro.   Even the name of Tim Ryan, whom yours truly casually brought up in my last post but quickly dismissed, has come up a few times.    Mr. Ryan would be interesting in that his selection would set up a rematch with J.D. Vance of the 2022 Ohio Senate race.   Mr. Vance won that one, but by a margin far narrower than the margin by which the rest of the Ohio GOP ticket won their offices.  Mr. Ryan remains the longest of shots, but I found it interesting that he has been mentioned.  Another name bandied about is that of Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, the former astronaut who was elected in a swing state and is married to Gabby Giffords, who remains a popular figure in this country for her courage and determination in the wake of the assassination attempt on her.   One could legitimately argue that none of these potential candidates is a moderate, but this is politics; it doesn’t matter if these guys are moderate, it only matters that they can be sold as moderate.   Given the attention span of the typical voter, such a sale should not be difficult.

 

Ms. Harris could also select a woman as her running mate, presenting the American people with the first all-female ticket in history.   A liberal friend of yours truly, a smart guy whom I have known and respected since college and who is originally from the Detroit suburbs, makes a terrific case for Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.   (Reportedly, Ms. Whitmer has taken herself out of the running for vice-president, but, c’mon, she’s a politician.)  Senator Amy Klobuchar would do her Party the double favor of being a woman who could move the ticket to the center.  She also has some ethnic and Midwest appeal.    At any rate, an all-female ticket would go a long way toward overcoming Ms. Harris’s obvious shortcomings.   Not only would it energize the Democratic Party, characterized most saliently by its obsession with identity politics, but would enchant the typical voter who has a hard time looking beyond the surface of things and so would be excited by the prospect of doing something historical.

 

 

Maybe, given the aforementioned Democratic obsession with identity politics paired with the problems of transferring the enormous Biden/Harris campaign fund to anybody but Ms. Harris (These money problems may turn out to be even more formidable than is widely believed at this stage; let’s see what happens in the coming days or weeks.    But I digress.), Ms. Harris was the only choice the Democrats realistically had.   Or perhaps nothing is set in stone, and Ms. Harris may still not wind up on the top of the ticket.  Yours truly doubts the latter, given the decidedly undemocratic nature of the Democratic Party and that the Party chieftains having settled on the candidate they will instruct the cadres to support.    

 

Ms. Harris will be the 2024 Democratic standard-bearer.   And she still can win; after all, she is running against Donald Trump, which, believe it or not, is a lot like playing the 2024 Chicago White Sox.   But this would have been a lot easier for the Democrats had they run, say, J.B. Pritzker…or Josie Dokes and Joe Bagodonuts.

 

SO WHO SHOULD AND/OR MIGHT REPLACE PRESIDENT BIDEN AT THE TOP OF THE TICKET?

 

7/10/24

 

As yours truly watches the developments of the last few days, I am reminded of Sam Spade’s telling the hapless rookie gunsel Wilmer Cook

 

“6, 2, and even, they’re selling you out, sonny”

 

as Kasper Gutman and Joel Cairo weigh their dwindling alternatives in the climactic scene of The Maltese Falcon.   While the outcome of the Democrats’ situation is difficult to predict as long as a guy with a tentative grip on reality holds so many cards, it sure looks like the powers-that-be in the Democratic Party, the same band of popinjays who consistently told us our own eyes were less truthful than their repeated gaslighting, are about to sell out their boy.

 

But who should these estimables select to replace President Biden, whose prospects don’t look any better than those of young Mr. Cook when the real prize is at stake?

 

It shouldn’t be hard to defeat either Donald Trump or Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race.  (See my nearly instantly seminal post THE DEMOCRATS SHOULD DUMP PRESIDENT BIDEN, BUT…, 7/1/24 and the earlier posts linked to it.)   While “None Of the above” is a perennial favorite in presidential races, this year Mr. Of the Above is making Ronald Reagan’s 1984 pummeling of Walter Mondale and Richard Nixon’s utter destruction of George McGovern in 1972 look like photo finishes.   Among the mounds of evidence that the electorate wants somebody, almost anybody, other than these two national embarrassments is last week’s Wall Street Journal poll.   When asked

 

“If you could change the majority party candidates for president, would you….”

 

47% of respondents favored “Replace both candidates on the ballot.”   That showing more than doubled the 22% who replied “Keep both candidates on the ballot.”   14% wanted to replace only President Biden, 12% wanted to replace only Mr. Trump.   Clearly, the numbers showed enormous, and growing, dissatisfaction with the standard-bearers of both major parties.   However, even these results wouldn’t be a big deal if they didn’t confirm numbers that prevailed for months; “the debate” just slightly intensified the voters’ disgust with both candidates and, of course, with one in particular.

 

So it seemed clear to yours truly as early as last November (See 2024 WILL NOT BE A BIDEN VS. TRUMP RACE, 11/18/23.) that at least one of the major parties would replace its then front runner.   In a variation on the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, if one of the parties replaced its front-runner while the other kept its guy, the former would win in a landslide.  It seemed all too easy.  However,  the Republicans long ago decided to eschew a potential cake walk to victory in favor of a hard slog along a tortuous, peril-infested path.   The Democrats appeared poised to make the same masochistic choice until, mirabile dictu, their standard-bearer proved so inept that he unwittingly handed his Party the gift that they had previously vociferously refused to accept.   To recall a classic Twilight Zone episode, the Dems got what they needed even if they don’t know it.  (“What You Need,” Christmas evening, 1959)

So assuming the Dems don’t blow this one, they have an opportunity to walk away with this election.   All they have to do, as I outlined in my 7/1/24 post, is nominate somebody who is

·         Not Joe Biden,

·         Reasonably moderate or can be marketed as such without inducing overwhelming amounts of laughter, as was done with Joe Biden in 2020, and

·         Not burdened by excessive amounts of personal or political baggage.

 

Who meets the above criteria?    The ideal candidate would be somebody whose name elicits the reaction “Who?”   The Democrats need the most generic candidate they can find, somebody on whom its various constituency groups can project their aspirations for a standard-bearer while pummeling the electorate with the message that Mr. Trump wants to eliminate abortion, imperil democracy, and engage in all sorts of other evil designs that he somehow didn’t get around to inflicting on us during his first term.   However, it looks like the ticket of Josie Dokes and Joe Bagodonuts will not be available this year, so the Dems must look elsewhere.

 

One of my readers mentioned Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky who has managed to win, and do a reasonably good job, in a deep red state.    Mr. Beshear would indeed be a great selection.   And, while we’re on the subject of Democratic governors of red states, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper would be worth a look.   Less anonymous but equally attractive would be Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who governs not a red state but, rather, a swing state that will be crucial in what will be a close election and who either is a moderate or has convinced a large number of voters of his moderation.   A not so prominent Democrat who so deeply impressed yours truly in the early stages of the 2020 candidate that I might even consider voting for him in a general election is Tim Ryan, a member of the U.S. House from Ohio.    However, that Mr. Ryan holds some viewpoints that might induce yours truly to remotely consider backing him surely dooms his chances in today’s Democratic Party, which is sad for our constitutional Republic, but that is grist for another mill.

 

Let’s be honest with ourselves, though:   None of the men mentioned in the last paragraph is going to appear on the top of the Democratic ticket.   So let’s get serious.

 

How about the Democratic Joan of Arc, Michelle Obama?   Clearly, the Obama camp would be pleased with this choice for any number of reasons, not the least of which is a nostalgic yearning for what they consider the good old Obama days.   And the guy who was in charge during those supposed halcyon days would have a lot of influence in his wife’s administration, despite the inevitable vociferous protestations to the contrary.   Nearly all the components of the Democratic base love Ms. Obama, and a large chunk of independents, primarily the group too widely defined as “suburban women” are ga-ga for Michelle, or so we are told.    Maybe most importantly, her candidacy could solve the “Kamala problem,” discussed more extensively below. 

 

However, Ms. Obama has repeatedly said she has no interest in the job.   Her only political experience and/or expertise comes from having served as First Lady and, one would hope should she somehow find herself back in the White House, from what she may have learned from her father, who was a Democratic precinct captain on the South Side of Chicago.   Therefore, Ms. Obama probably is a bridge too far, but, by today’s lowered standards for the presidency (Look, again, at the two guys currently at the top of the Republican and Democratic tickets.), having been First Lady may be all it takes.   And, while Ms. Obama might continue to insist that she is not interested in the job, the decision may not be entirely hers, especially in these parlous times for the Democratic Party, and we all know better than to take somebody even remotely connected to politics at her or his word.   So Ms. Obama, while a long shot, shouldn’t be counted out of the running entirely.

 

How about the woman who is considered by many the only practical alternative to Mr. Biden, Vice-President Kamala Harris?    Denying the sitting Vice-President, who, in this case is both Black and a woman, the nomination of a Party that is obsessed with identity politics would be, at the very least, a very bad look, and has the potential to tear the Party asunder.   And the $100mm plus in the Biden/Harris campaign war chest can, if Mr. Biden bows out, only go to Ms. Harris, as far as anybody has been able to figure out, and then only after Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris win the nomination, according to at least a few people who seem to know a thing or two about such matters.    These are two compelling arguments for somehow granting Ms. Harris the top spot on the ticket and only after Mr. Biden is formally nominated, which would be quite a trick even by Democratic Party standards.   Besides the difficulty of doing so, there is also the, according to the polls, the reality that Ms. Harris only marginally improves the Democrats’ chances in a race against Mr. Trump.   Is it worth it to go through all these machinations and rigamarole to pick up a percentage point or two?   Only, it seems, if there is no alternative, and there may not be.

 

On the other hand, dumping Ms. Harris may not tear the party apart.   James Clyburn, the South Carolina Democratic U.S. House Representative who fancies himself, somewhat justifiably, as the kingmaker in Black Democratic politics, a modern day Big Bill Dawson, and the guy who, supposedly, gave Mr. Biden the nomination in 2020, has, in at least one of his observations in the midst of this dumpster fire for the Democrats, called for a “mini-primary” to determine the Party’s nominee should President Biden drop out, insisting that whatever a “mini-primary” is would be “fair to everybody.”   If Mr. Clyburn is even halfway indicating that he will not be “all-in” for Ms. Harris in a post-Biden race for the Democratic nomination, maybe the Dems would be able to eject her from the ticket, or at least the top of the ticket, without tearing the Party apart.   But there remains the money problem, and it’s a big one.

 

If yours truly were a Democrat, and it looked like there was a way to get around the “Kamala problem,” I would be trying to drum up support for the guy who, in my opinion, would be the strongest candidate, none other than Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.   Mr. Pritzker could eliminate the money problem merely by writing a check; after all, his checkbook is responsible for a large measure of his political success to date.   But his desirability as a Democratic candidate transcends his financial assets.   He has a reasonably good story to tell, a story that he labels responsible compassion or compassionate responsibility, or some such drivel.   According to this story, he has vastly improved the finances of the state of Illinois, indeed, brought the state back from the brink of fiscal collapse, while maintaining his fealty to every Democratic social objective and interest group.   While one could poke plenty of holes in this story, it is objectively true:   Illinois is, after a term and a quarter of Mr. Pritzker, in better fiscal shape than it has been for years.   Seemingly unbeknownst to much of the electorate, or at least to those among the pundits who scream the loudest, the biggest issue in 2024 is the fiscal condition of this nation’s government, which is abysmal and bound to get worse should either of the current major party candidates get elected.   It could, probably will, also get worse should Mr. Pritzker somehow wind up in the White House, but at least he can somewhat legitimately promote himself as a governor who has actually reduced his state’s deficit and can do so while completely legitimately assuring his Party’s base that he has been an ardent champion for their interests.  J.B. Pritzker is what the Democratic Party needs.    Whether he is what the country needs is an entirely different question, but, right now, at least to the politicians, what the country needs is not the priority.

 

Any of the aforementioned, save Mr. Biden and, probably, Ms. Harris, defeats Mr. Trump in 2024.   All the Democrats have to do is accept the gift fate has, belatedly due to their own hubris, given them.

 

LET’S ASSUME FOR A MOMENT THAT PRESIDENT BIDEN ISN’T TELLING THE TRUTH…

 

7/4/24

Far be it for yours truly, or anybody, to accuse a politician of prevaricating or President Biden of not realizing what he is saying, but, assume for a moment that all of Mr. Biden’s protestations that he has no plans to drop out of the presidential race are somehow untrue.  

 Should Mr. Biden really be on his way out of the race, his, or the Party’s, timing would come into question.  If Mr. Biden is indeed getting out of the race, why doesn’t he just do it now?   Depending on how conspiratorial one wants to get, there could be a number of reasons.

One possible reason for the delay involves party nominating rules.  if Mr. Biden leaves the race before being formally nominated, what was supposed to be three-day celebration of the wisdom of choosing such a titan of modern statesmanship as the Democrats’ standard-bearer would turn into something actually meaningful, something we haven’t seen since 1980, or maybe 1968:  an open convention.   However, if Mr. Biden leaves the race after being coronated at the United Center, his replacement would be decided by a series of deals and schemes concocted by Democratic party elders, a return to the smoke-filled rooms of the past, though were we to deal with actual smoke-filled rooms in 2024, the smoke might have an entirely different origin than was the case in, say, 1948, but I digress.

Yours truly is of the admittedly unconventional view that an open convention would be good for the Democrats.   As I said in my last, nearly instantly seminal, post (THE DEMOCRATS SHOULD DUMP PRESIDENT BIDEN, BUT…, 7/1/24), an open convention would be something most potential viewers have never seen.   It would be exciting, maybe even riveting.   Viewership of the conventions, which have become more sleep-inducing than a speech by a Fed chairman, has done a convincing imitation of the Hindenburg over the last forty or so years.   But not a post-Biden withdrawal 2024 convention.  Decisions would be made.   Drama would be everywhere.   Rumors and innuendo would fly.   The people would love it and watch intently; it would be the ultimate shiny object.   The Dems would be getting all the publicity, and, despite what you might be told and despite all the falsehoods you have heard about the ’68 convention’s horrific consequences for the Democratic ticket that year, the old adage about there being no bad publicity would apply to an exciting, brawl of a Democratic convention.   People would soon be asking “Donald who?”  

 

Another advantage of an open convention for the Democrats in 2024 is that it would be easier for the Democrats to dump Kamala Harris from the ticket, or at least to keep her in the second slot on that ticket, under such circumstances.   (A further discussion of Vice-President Harris in this context will be grist for a latter post, so keep reading my posts.)  An open convention provides a degree of plausible deniability, as in “We didn’t drop Kamala; it was the will of the people as transmitted through their duly elected delegates” or some such drivel.

 

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on one’s point of view, my well-reasoned thoughts on the desirability of an open convention is not, well, conventional wisdom.   The Democratic powers-that-be don’t want to take a chance on a messy, disorderly, or worse, convention, though it’s starting to look like such an outcome is inevitable, which is grist for yet another mill.   So they would probably like to see President Biden be nominated before stepping aside so they then can go about doing their wheeling and dealing to choose the candidate they want.   As yours truly has pointed out before, the Democratic Party, despite its nearly fraudulent name, is the less democratic of the two major parties.   It could be plausibly argued that the proverbial fix was in for the Democrats in 2020, 2016, 2008, 2000, and 1968, and I’ve probably skipped a few election years in that series.   Why should this year be any different?    If yours truly is right in my assessment of the wishes of the elders of the Democratic Party, it would make sense to delay Mr. Biden’s withdrawal until after the Chicago convention.

 

Another reason to delay revealing the truth about Mr. Biden’s candidacy is the desire to make Donald Trump’s selection of a running mate more difficult by forcing him to make that decision without benefit of knowing who his opponent would be.   Mr. Trump would have more latitude in this choice if he knew he would be facing Mr. Biden than he would if he were choosing a more formidable (as in “just about any other”) candidate.

 

A third reason to delay Mr. Biden’s withdrawal from the race, should that be the intention, also involves Mr. Trump’s choice of a running mate.   Delaying the withdrawal until, say, 15 minutes after Mr. Trump announces his running mate, would steal the 72 hours or so of nearly undivided attention such a selection usually brings.   Mr. Trump makes his selection, everyone is excitedly focusing on that choice, 15 minutes later Mr. Biden withdraws, and people forget about Mr. Trump and what’s his, or her, name.

 

Before we start having too much fun with this, recall what I wrote near the end of my last post:

 

“Will the Democrats remove Mr. Biden?   The prospects decrease with every day that last Thursday fades into the proverbial rear view mirror.”

Last Thursday is fading fast, so the chances that Mr. Biden sticks on the ticket are increasing.   However, one, or maybe two, more “bad days” will seal Mr. Biden’s fate, so we have to be thinking of what comes next.

In my next post, I will start naming names, as many of my readers have requested.   But it’s Independence Day, my wonderful wife and I are off to a celebration of our nation’s birth, and I am trying to keep these posts short.   So the real fun will have to wait a few days…unless developments render speculation regarding a replacement moot.

THE DEMOCRATS SHOULD DUMP PRESIDENT BIDEN, BUT…

 

7/1/24

 

Yours truly has been arguing since late 2023 that the 2024 presidential race will not be a Biden/Trump contest; see my uncannily prescient 4/8/24 piece, NOW IT’S THE DEMOCRATS WHO ARE “IN A WHOLE HEAP OF TROUBLE” and the posts linked to it.   In that April piece, which was my most recent post on this blog and that merits a re-reading even before proceeding with this missive, I outlined a situation that seemed obvious to yours truly, and hence to you, my loyal readers, at the time.    It has taken the rest of the world a while to catch up, but, in the wake of President Biden’s debate debacle, while it is not clear that the Democrats will replace Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket, it is glaringly obvious that they should show old Joe the door.   This is clear to anybody not blinded by an unwillingness to see born of intimidation by the enormity of the task of replacing Mr. Biden or by Mr. Biden’s reputation for vengefulness, a reputation that rivals that of Donald Trump.

Why should the Democrats rid themselves of the albatross they have created at the top of their ticket?   The first and most obvious reason is for the good of the country.   If there were ever any doubt that Mr. Biden is incapable of serving in more than a titular manner in the most demanding job on the planet, that doubt was removed by last week’s debate.   This is not a matter of age; it is a matter of mental vigor and competence.   Mr. Biden simply is not “all there” any more and that is glaringly obvious.   The estimables of the Democratic Party and their accomplices in the press had been telling us not to believe our lying eyes, that the signs we were seeing of Mr. Biden’s enfeeblement were “deep fakes,” that the President was, if you will, richly adorned, but we, like the little boy in the fable, could see on Thursday night that the Emperor had no clothes.  Mr. Biden, it is now readily apparent, enters the battle of wits completely unarmed.   The learned commentators on both sides of this country’s yawning ideological gap were quick to caution us that our allies were watching the debate and doubtless walking away unsettled, but it took them awhile to point out that our adversaries were also watching the debate and walking away encouraged.   This is, to put it perhaps tritely, no way to run a country. 

 

The problem with this “good of the country” argument for replacing President Biden is that it naturally leads to the argument that Section 4 of the 25^th Amendment should quickly be invoked, removing President Biden from office as soon as possible before our enemies get the idea that they ought to strike while the proverbial iron is hot.   Replacing the President as his Party’s standard-bearer would be difficult enough; removing him from office would be a herculean task in a Party, and an entire political class, woefully bereft of herculean figures.

 

The good news for the Democrats, and perhaps for the country, is that, leaving aside the patriotic argument, there are clearly political reasons to give Joe Biden the proverbial gold watch and send him into not early enough retirement.    The most salient of these is glaringly obvious, at least to yours truly; to wit, if the Democrats carefully replace Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket, they will win the election, probably take over the House, and vastly improve their chances of retaining the Senate in a year in which the electoral deck is heavily stacked against them in the latter chamber.

 

Why am I so confident in this prediction?   It is abundantly clear, from polls, from conversations that all of us have had with people from all points on the political spectrum, and from other forms of anecdotal evidence that the far and away favorite presidential candidate, even more so than in years past, is “somebody other than these two jokers.”   People are crying out for a candidate who is neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump, and yahoos and carnival barkers like Chase Oliver, Jill Stein, Cornell West, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will not fill the bill.   Since the GOP has apparently failed to grasp that the broader electorate is not nearly as enamored of their standard-bearer as they are, all the Democrats have to do to win this election is to nominate somebody who is

 

·         Not Joe Biden,

·         Reasonably moderate or can be marketed as such without inducing overwhelming amounts of laughter, as was done with Joe Biden in 2020, and

·         Not burdened by excessive amounts of personal or political baggage.

 

The third of the preceding points rules out the likes of Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and Gavin Newsom, all names that have entered the conversation.    The Democrats don’t need to replace trouble with trouble.   All they need to do is to find somebody sufficiently milquetoast and non-descript to sneak past an increasingly apathetic electorate who will lap up the “Trump is the end of Democracy who will, among other things, end abortion,” argument that has been their entire campaign up to now and on which they were counting to bring Joe Biden home to victory in November before he made that such a longshot last Thursday night.

 

But what about Kamala Harris?   As I’ve written before, most recently in the aforementioned certainly now seminal 4/8/24 piece, Vice-President Harris is a problem, but a problem that the Democrats are surely smart enough to overcome, as is the perhaps larger, and related, problem of the hundreds of millions of Biden/Harris campaign dollars that, apparently, only Ms. Harris could access should Mr. Biden be persuaded to step aside.

What about the problems that will arise from an open convention?   One suspects that, given how the Democratic Party, despite its name, usually works (Again, see that searingly insightful 4/8 piece.), one suspects that the convention will be open, if at all, only nominally.    But yours truly would argue that a truly open convention would actually help the Democrats by focusing the electorate on something exciting that most people have not seen in their lifetimes.   People love shiny objects.  The campaign had been rendered dull and tarnished by the absence of meaningful primary races in either party and was only awakened from its slumber by, well, Mr. Biden’s slumber last Thursday night.   An open convention would surely rouse the campaign from what will doubtless be the nap it will re-assume by August.

Will the Democrats remove Mr. Biden?   The prospects decrease with every day that last Thursday fades into the proverbial rear view mirror.

Should the Democrats replace Mr. Biden?   Most assuredly, if they want to win the presidency, and perhaps both houses of the Congress.   The GOP has handed the Democrats an opportunity of a lifetime; they would be foolish and/or or timid to the point of pathos, not to take it.