Over the weekend here at The American Spectator, the estimable Rick Marschall posted something which has been a common point in discussions across the fruited plain. Marschall declared that Joe Biden, thanks to his son Hunter being convicted on federal firearms charges, now has a dignified way out and can exit the 2024 presidential field to make way for someone more, uhh …
How to do that without turning the nomination over to Kamala Harris, which would in effect be to concede the 2024 election.
I won’t write it. I’m trying to be nice. You people know what I was about to say.
Anyway, Marschall makes a pretty good case for Biden bailing out of the race and taking Kamala Harris with him into political oblivion. I’m going to offer the counterpoint to it.
It’s not that he’s all wrong, of course. By any reasonable standard, Marschall absolutely ought to be right. It’s utterly absurd that a man who walks like an invalid and has to be led around so he doesn’t fall, who blurts out syllable salads instead of the text on his teleprompter and frequently suffers brain freezes in public — this week we might very well see one of those brain freezes in the middle of a presidential debate with Donald Trump; let’s hope Trump stifles the reasonable urge to spike the football in Biden’s face if that happens — would be a major political party’s candidate for president. (READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: ‘Our Democracy’ Turns Deadly)
I remember back in 1992, when Ross Perot’s running mate Admiral James Stockdale had a bit of a senior-moment struggle with a hearing aid in a debate with Dan Quayle and Al Gore, and it was seen as disqualifying. Stockdale was a regular Harry Potter compared to the husk of a man the Democrats are presenting at the top of the ticket, and far more frightening is the recognition that Biden is still nominally running the country.
But that’s just it, isn’t it? He isn’t running the country.
You’re not supposed to know who’s running the country, though clearly Barack Obama is still calling the shots from his mansion in Kalorama. Whether Obama does so directly or simply inspires various initiatives implemented by his devotees among Biden’s handlers, we don’t know and we’re not sure it matters.
And this is why I’m pumping the brakes on the idea that Joe Biden isn’t long for the political world.
Because when he goes, if he goes, all of those handlers are subject to going with him.
Oh, sure, you say, they’ll still be around; Team Obama will just install a fresh new puppet and the show will go on.
Ehhhh, don’t be so sure about that.
A political machine is a lot like a jet engine. It needs a lot of fine tuning, and you’ve got to supply it with a constant amount of grease. And you’d better have very good mechanics working on the thing, or else it could drop right out of the sky.
That’s not to say Biden’s mechanics are any good. But they sure do think highly of themselves, and because of that these praetorians are going to guard their praetor very jealously.
How anxious do you think Jill Biden is to be packed up and deposed from the White House? Do you think Karine Jean-Pierre believes her career prospects are on a skyrocket when she leaves her current job? How relevant do you think Jeff Zients is going to be when somebody else is the president?
All of those people face life in the private sector. And as Ray Stantz said, that’s dicey …
None of these guys are the least bit put out that their putative boss is a shambling, potato-brained, walking humiliation of a man whose family is a rotting cesspool of felonious corruption and whose presence on the world stage daily diminishes America’s national prestige. Biden’s America might be a ruin, but they’re ruling over it. Yank Dirty Joe out of that chair and these guys might not have many seats of their own.
So who in Biden’s inner circle is telling him it’s time to pack it up? Jean-Pierre went out to her podium last week and directly gaslit the entire White House press corps about something called “cheap fakes” — which to the best of my understanding involves real video interpreted the way normal people would interpret it, but it’s a fake because Karine Jean-Pierre, the presidential spokeslesbian, isn’t comfortable with the public sharing that interpretation.
You can laugh at the video of her imitating Kevin Bacon’s “All Is Well!” protestations, but the lesson there is how utterly locked in Biden’s handlers are right now. Somebody told Queen Karine to push all those chips in, you know.
This means someone with enough stroke will have to dictate to Biden and his people that it’s over and he’s got to surrender the reins. Who’s that going to be? Obama?
Why would Obama do that?
Oh, because they can replace Biden with Hillary Clinton, goes one theory.
Forgive me, but forget that.
Why would Barack Obama agree to trade out Biden for Hillary? Assuming that Obama believes his political machine can harvest enough ballots for either one to win, which is a necessary assumption because it’s certainly not in evidence that Hillary, who might be a little more cognitively capable than Biden but certainly wouldn’t bring any more charisma or popularity to the top of the ticket, would reverse Biden’s declining poll numbers.
Let’s remember that if Hillary, perhaps the most pronounced megalomaniac in modern American politics even when Obama is considered, were to become president there is absolutely zero telling her what to do. And Biden’s inner circle would most assuredly not be Hillary’s.
Neither would Obama’s.
And if they were going to dump Biden to parachute Michelle Obama in as the nominee, I suspect you’d see a lot more buzz about that by now. I think we’re at the point where we have to say it’s clear she really doesn’t want the job like the Obama insiders have said all along.
The other options? Gavin Newsom? Gretchen Whitmer? J.B. Pritzker? Those all poll worse than Biden does. You’re conceding the election running any of them against Trump.
And if you’re conceding the election, do you really want to pass Kamala Harris over? Doing so will enrage black women, the most monolithically supportive demographic group the Democrat Party has. With the inroads Trump is already making with black men, I’m not sure the Dems can afford to play with fire by alienating black women, and they’re the only group in the whole country that actually likes Kamala. Of course, you can argue even that isn’t as damaging as sending her out to represent the ticket, and there is the consideration of what an implosion at the top of the ticket will do to Democrats down the ballot. (READ MORE: What They’ve Done to Star Wars, They’re Trying to Do to America)
As an aside, have you ever seen a major political party with a bench this woefully short? What a disaster the Democrats are!
I disagree with Marschall when he says getting rid of Biden would “rejuvenate” the Democrats. They had two dozen other candidates in 2020 and the Obama machine picked Biden and Harris because the others were just that bad. Nothing much has changed since then. Or do you think Gay Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s time for national elected office has come? How about Mean Amy Klobuchar? Or Chief Spreading Bull, otherwise known as Liz Warren?
I’m not saying circumstances can’t deteriorate to an extent that these decisions won’t be made. In six weeks, or three months, Joe Biden could well be in a state where the whole country understands he belongs in a nursing home, and when that day comes they’re going to have to change him out.
How to do that without turning the nomination over to Kamala Harris, which would in effect be to concede the 2024 election not just at the top of the ticket but in Senate and House races as well, I don’t know.
Then there is the other matter of this “virtual roll call” the Democrats say they’re going to use to pre-select their nominee before the convention, as a means to remedy the logistical snafu of scheduling their Chicago confab after Ohio’s legal ballot deadline. Nobody is talking about this but it could end up as a big deal, you know — it isn’t that unconventional for delegates to a convention to get together and choose a ticket, that’s been done quite often in the past, but to attempt to do it “virtually” before the convention, particularly if Biden isn’t saying he wants out, is a recipe for an abject mess.
Again, Biden ought to be out. And Marschall is not wrong to say Hunter’s gun-charges conviction provides that “spending some time with my family” moment for Biden to hit the eject button.
But there have been plenty of other such moments already, and Team Biden has hung in there.
Marschall could well end up being right. But I’m struggling to spot a mechanism for how. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re going to ride Joe Biden until he, literally or figuratively, becomes, unmistakably, Joe Deadhorse. And if that happens before the election, I don’t know how they can skip over Kamala Harris for any of the other possibilities.
