Guest Column: How the Democrats Blew This Election

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John Barnes is one of my oldest friends in the world of conservative journalism. We were fellow interns (along with John Fund and the late Martin Morse Wooster) at Stan Evans’s National Journalism Center back in 1981, and he enjoyed a career in opinion journalism at both the Detroit News and N.Y. Post. He wrote the following note for his friends a few days ago, and I thought it was so good that I asked his permission to post it with us.

In 1862, with Union fortunes in the Civil War at a low ebb, Ohio Republican Sen. Ben Wade went to see Abraham Lincoln and urged him to fire Gen. George McClellan.

“And replace him with who, senator?” Lincoln asked.

“Anybody,” Wade replied.

“Anybody may be good enough for you, senator,” Lincoln said. “But I must have somebody.”

Which brings to mind the conundrum the Democrats face in this year’s election.

Back in 2020, with pandemic ongoing and the Summer of George, it seems a bare majority of the American people were ready to replace Donald Trump. But with whom? Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were clearly un-electable. Mayor Pete got gobs of undeserved publicity simply for being gay, but few thought the electorate was going to hand him the nuclear codes after only running (badly, BTW) the 199th largest city in America. Amy Klobuchar? (WHO?)

That left Joe Biden, the very definition of an old political warhorse, whose third bid for the brass ring was in the ditch, having finished way back in the pack in both Iowa and New Hampshire.

But who else was there? The Democratic kingmakers promptly cleared the field for him, effectively negating the ballots of tens of thousands of primary voters. Effectively, the Democrats were settling for “anybody” but Trump. And in the peculiar environment of that year, it was (barely) enough.

Unfortunately, the Democrats (and the nation) have discovered that when you settle for “anybody,” you get, well, ANYBODY.

Biden ran in 2020 promising basically three things: 1) He would “lock down the pandemic, not the country;” 2) he would get the economy back on track; and 3) he would unite the country after the “divisive” aberration of the Trump presidency.

On all three counts, he failed to deliver. Even after being handed what was marketed as a vaccine by the Trump administration, more Americans died of COVID on Biden’s watch than on Trump’s. The economic recovery has been as anemic as Obama’s was from 2008 — with the added “bonus” of the return of inflation after four decades. Finally, Biden’s hot temper and Ahab-like determination to destroy Donald Trump only drove the country’s divisions even deeper.

And none of this was to mention Biden’s increasingly obvious physical and mental disability that made his ego-driven bid for a second term look positively fantastical.

Realizing they had settled for “anybody” and gotten him, the Democratic kingmakers decided to re-run the 2020 playbook. Faced with an un-electable incumbent, they staged what amounted to a palace coup and forced him to remove himself from the race with only four months remaining to the election.

But Lincoln’s question loomed. Replace him with whom?

While it appears that Barack Obama and Nancy PelosiZ—the prime movers behind the coup—wanted some kind of “lightning primary” to choose a candidate (likely CA Gov. Gavin Newsom), Biden made their decision for them by endorsing his VP, Harris. Boxed in by their own racial and sexual ideology, the Democratic establishment had little choice but to go along.

But Harris was far from ideal. She was famously unpopular, having dropped out of the 2020 election campaign before the calendar had even turned to 2020. Biden didn’t want her as his running mate (he preferred MI Gov. Gretchen Whitmer), but he owed SC Rep. James Clyburn his nomination and the latter insisted on a “woman of color.” Harris was the only remotely plausible choice, so she got the nod.

As Veep, she lived down to expectations, making a series of gaffes and going through staff like matchsticks amid leaks about laziness and poor preparation.

Once again, the Democrats had settled for “anybody.” Unfortunately for them, it doesn’t appear “anybody” will be able to do the trick this time.

Whatever else you think of him, Donald Trump is undeniably “somebody.” He’s a man of numerous accomplishments. You can see, feel and touch the buildings he’s constructed and play on the golf courses he’s built. His personal life has been, er, UNCONVENTIONAL. But Bill Clinton blew conventional personal lives for presidents out of the water.

And like one of those funhouse clowns that keeps popping up smiling no matter how hard or how many times you punch him in the nose, Trump steadfastly refuses to go down and stay down. His opponents — not all of them Democrats, by any means — have thrown literally everything at him in an effort to remove him from the political stage. (Up to and including assassination.) None of it has worked, or seems likely to.