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.