Why the Democrats Can't Replace Biden

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March 1, 2024

After the release of Special Counsel Kennth Hur’s report on Joe Biden’s mishandling classified documents and then the President’s performance several hours later in his hastily convened press conference, a number of Democrats fleetingly expressed misgivings about the head of their party’s reelection prospects next November. Let’s face it — if your Grandpa likewise raved and ranted after his memory and mental acuity had been called into question, you would seriously start to consider taking away his car keys. Adding to the Dems electoral hyper-anxiety is the fact that the President’s forgetfulness and confused ramblings won’t ameliorate on the hustings over the next eight months — they can only worsen. Conversely, Donald Trump, while only a few years younger, campaigns as if possessed of the vitality of a honey badger.

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If, as Democrats tirelessly pronounce, Donald Trump indeed posed such a grave threat to democracy, not to mention the American Way of Life, you would think their party’s leaders would have substituted a less-doddering presidential candidate with higher approval polls long before now. The success of Democrat candidates up and down November’s ballot depend on a strong showing from Biden in the general election. Admittedly, the President might not willingly be pushed aside because he has a son and brother to protect from even a slightly more independent DoJ. Theoretically, the leaders of his party could bring overwhelming pressure to bear on Biden and his family for him to bow out for “health reasons” before the August National Convention, effectively triggering a Dismissal on Request (DOR). But any such move is unlikely this side of a disabling stroke or conspicuous manifestations of acute dementia, because they simply cannot put forward any replacement candidate who is both politically propitious and acceptable.

Ordinarily, Biden’s understudy in these circumstances would be his Vice-President Kamala Harris. However, Harris is, in her own inimitable way, as rambling and incoherent as the 81-year-old man she would replace on the ballot. Harris immeasurably distresses loyalists in her own party whenever she appears before a camera even more than Biden does, because she frequently speaks as though she were a skipping record. Even more distressing, Harris is the only national politician holding even lower approval ratings than Biden. But you can’t tell that to the Vice-President: she’s blithely announced that she’s ready to serve as our nation’s chief executive; pushing her aside without her protesting terrifically, even if only behind the scenes, would be next to impossible.

Were Democrat sachems somehow able to find a way to bully Harris into stepping aside graciously for another nationally prominent Democrat, such as California governor Gavin Newsom, bypassing the Vice President would result in an even greater electoral disaster by infuriating two of the Democrat’s key constituencies: women and African Americans. Before the party consensus unexpectedly (and conveniently) coalesced around Biden shortly into the 2020 Democratic primary season, Harris and no less than five other women, no matter how briefly, vied for their party’s nomination and might be seen by woman voters as rightfully possessing the prior claim. Going back for grievances even further, some African Americans declined to cast a vote for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential general election in part because she had the effrontery to run against Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries eight years earlier – notwithstanding his enthusiastic support of her campaign against Donald Trump. The unavoidable downside to the Democrats’ topmost electoral strategy of turning out huge margins from the core segments of their base on Election Day is that they cannot afford to disaffect any of those needed voters to any significant degree.

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Privately, Democrats may be pining badly for Michelle Obama to leap-frog ahead of the Vice-President without splintering the party faithful. The former First Lady would presumably campaign arm-in-arm with her husband on the old party platform of “two Presidents for the price of one.” But on more than one occasion, Ms. Obama has essentially announced through her and her husband’s political associates that she has no intention of running for the Oval Office. Who can blame her? She has always been repelled by the tawdriness of retail American politics, and she is well satisfied with her and her husband’s place in American history. Whoever becomes president next year will encounter a continuing steam of foreign and domestic calamities, as well as well-nigh insurmountable financial challenges. Michelle Obama is justifiably prudent in her unwillingness to subject herself and her family to lower approval ratings this time next year than either Joe Biden or Donald Trump are scoring this year.

Following a reassessment of their November prospects therefore, the Democrat party has fallen in lockstep, however wistfully, behind the candidate it’s got. In order to thwart the “fascist” Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican followers, Dems will force themselves to campaign as though they did not privately dread that Biden might — at any minute — manifest an acute level of clinical senility in public. Tactically, Democrat politicians and administration officials are now recounting second-hand instances of Biden’s astounding total recall and cerebral mastery, no matter how these accounts are belied by what the public has seen and will see in the months to come. At the same time, party apparatchiks have been launching ferocious attacks on the so-called “gratuitous” remarks in the Special Counsel’s report, entirely forgetting that the SC learned the art of drafting “knife in the back” no-charges prosecutorial memoranda during his time working for SC Robert Mueller on the Russian Collusion investigation. And when the voters see the transcripts of Biden’s interviews with SC Hur or hear the actual recordings, should the White House’s recently lodged objections to their release be overcome, Democrats may find that gratuitousness is often in the eye of the beholder.

But you can’t really blame the Democrats for desperately trying to hide, minimize, and outright reject the perturbing and increasingly embarrassing progression of physical and cognitive deficits in their party’s candidate for President. Right up until the day after Tuesday, November 5^th, they got no place else to go.

Image: White House