Worst of All Worlds . . . For Democrats
The time for a political party to deal with a decrepit, elderly figurehead is not after the primaries, in which he won millions of votes and is presumptively guaranteed to be the party’s nominee. The recent attempts to replace President Biden as the Democrats’ candidate, coupled with his steadfast refusal to withdraw, put him and his party in a terrible position.
Not only was he obviously suffering from some form of cognitive impairment during his early debate with Trump, but now large numbers of senior Democrats and media figures have admitted this, demanded his resignation, and otherwise expressed a lack of confidence. This is, of course, a desperate attempt to win after internal polling shows he had fallen even further behind, because it was already obvious to most people that Biden wasn’t “all there.”
To some extent, the conspiracy of silence and Biden’s occasional moments of lucidity permitted these concerns to be denied and deflected until now. But this kind of careful stage management can only go so far. He is who he is, and his avoidance of some core parts of the job—meeting with regular people, press conferences, and the use of his brain—has been enabled to the fullest extent possible.
If Biden were to cooperate in these efforts and refuse the nomination, it would beg the question of whether he maintains sufficient fitness for office. After all, his term is not done until January 2025. Such a departure would also lead to an open question of whom to replace him with.
Kamala Harris has obvious problems; not least, she has never won a single state previously as a primary candidate. She is notoriously awkward, devoid of charisma, and kind of dumb. She got the job because she met Biden’s minimum standards to be a vice president, not least his demand that the person be a woman and a minority.
The bigger problem with the recent rebellion against Biden’s candidacy is Biden himself. Nothing about his rise was organic. He has been around a long time and has always been a blowhard, dishonest, kind of rude person, and all of this was capped off by an astronomical ego. He has problems today because he was installed in 2020 with the blessing and machinations of the highest Democratic Party leadership, likely with Barack Obama pulling most of the strings.
Thus, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg all pulled out of the race before Super Tuesday in 2020. And the COVID hysteria permitted Biden’s shortcomings—his lack of energy and inability to think and speak clearly—to be largely hidden from the public. He campaigned from the basement, with television ads and news media complicity doing most of the heavy lifting.
In addition, the 2020 general election was rather notoriously “fortified.” We do not know the exact manner and extent to which various changes affected the outcome in 2020, but we do know there was an unprecedented use of hard-to-verify mailed ballots, late-night stoppages of vote counts, and lots of people paid by anti-Trump partisans involved in the vote counting process.
In other words, Biden and his presidency have always been fragile because Biden’s 2020 election does not reflect the normal democratic process and the stratagems that artificially inflated his support created a corresponding reduction in his long-term popularity.
Perhaps, having installed Biden, the Democratic Party’s leadership and big donors figured Biden would do as he was told. But like so many people placed into jobs because of nepotism, affirmative action, and other anti-competitive tricks, he has quickly assumed a strong sense of personal entitlement. It does not get more powerful than President of the United States, where a cast of thousands makes life as orderly, pleasant, and reflective of one’s wishes as possible. Already blessed with a huge ego, Biden’s ego could only grow in office.
Plus, his wife clearly is very comfortable with the trappings of money and power that her husband’s office provides. We should not forget that Biden is the central node in a sprawling and complicated family-wide scheme of grifting, influence peddling, and self-enrichment. These are people who like money, pomp, and power. It is no surprise that his failson Hunter Biden assumed a big role as an advisor and leads the effort to persuade his dad to remain in office and continue his reelection campaign.
Even if there were some ideal candidate waiting in the wings, the optics of changing horses this late in the race and the logistical challenges of ballot access may not be easily surmountable. Biden, if nothing else, has name recognition and did win (sorta) at least one national election, which is more than could be said for Kamala Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsome, or others whose names have been bandied about.
It is, honestly, a beautiful thing to behold. One faction of the Democratic Party tried to create insurmountable pressure on Biden to drop out, citing his manifest cognitive issues, which were on display in the televised debate with Trump. The early debate itself was a risk that Biden undertook to give his failing campaign shock therapy.
In the course of the post-debate discussions about Biden’s competence, internal polls leaked, which showed the extent of the damage. Then heavy hitters like Obama and Bill Clinton weighed in and said everyone should chill out and stick with Biden. Biden himself said he was going nowhere. Then everyone rather unpersuasively began to shift gears and suggest Biden merely had a “bad night.”
A disunified Democratic Party played a clever game in 2020, and now that game is backfiring. They were able to rig things one time and pull an incompetent and incapable candidate over the finish line, but now the guy they installed won’t leave. They can’t figure out how to make him win again or whom to embrace as an alternative, even as the party is unified in its loathing of Donald Trump.
The party that makes a fetish of democracy is now going to be beaten democratically because its antidemocratic tricks failed to account for their figurehead not cooperating and the people themselves being disgusted with his performance.
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