Apologies to my progressive Trump-hating friends who see the re-election of the former president as a step toward American fascism, but the criticism leveled almost daily by Republicans of all stripes is correct: the Democratic Party is in disarray.
Setting aside emotionalism and ideological preferences for a moment, the cold hard facts speak for themselves.
President Joe Boden did not seem suitable for public office, let alone the presidency. His age caught up to him, which happens to people in their eighties. That is no surprise.
The horror, in political terms, is that his party, sensing and seeing his decline, did not intervene months ago, last fall even, to get him to step aside. Had they negotiated with him far earlier, ahead of the primaries, they might have struck a deal with the aging Biden, permitting him to save face long before now by handing over the reins to his vice president.
But no. They instead encouraged him to take on Trump directly, a fool’s errand, and make his way haltingly through the primaries, by which time the president acquired a sense of being on some holy mission. The delusion that he was a kind of Don Quixote and Trump the windmill conferred on the president the sense that errors and stumblings did not matter so long as he remained on his horse, lance in hand.
I am no novice. I worked on both Clinton campaigns in the 1990s, was a volunteer in Al Gore’s run, and organized district-by-district campaigning for John Kerry, these last two efforts ending in Democratic failures.
But the party I worked for at least had logic on its side.
This latest party does not.
Though someone like Harris may be clearer and more cohesive than Biden, she’s a national unknown.
Many Democrats were openly calling on Biden to step down. He cannot beat Trump, they said, and his mind is shaky. To which Biden, back to the matter of face, replied, “Not on your life.” It is, to put it mildly, a destructive and humiliating back-and-forth.
Kamala Harris may yet turn out to be a fine party leader, but to place her in the position of replacing her boss on the near-even of the Democratic convention is like asking a younger brother to estrange an older one because the neighbors are restive. It’s family feud theater of the worst kind.
It’s true: this stumbling version of Biden may well fall short of Trump, given momentum by an assassination attempt the Democrats insist was a staged conspiracy — forgetting what military snipers the world over have always said, namely that if you want to feign an assassination attempt, never shoot above the neck. The risk is too great you’ll kill the object of the conspiracy, ruining the plot. In a nutshell, the Trump bullet came too close. No intelligent agent of a conspiracy would have taken such a shot.
But the conspiracy theorists on both sides will have their day for months, if not years, to come.
And since the Democrats cannot shoot at Biden, to elevate him to Trump’s demi-martyr status, what do they do? Why, tell him to leave, what else.
As things stand now, the Democrats would have looked awful with or without the shooting.
Since Biden, in a rare show of practicality, has capitulated, they get a new leader no one really knows with only three months left in the campaigning season. Though someone like Harris may be clearer and more cohesive than Biden, she’s a national unknown.
I repeat my mantra: Biden should have agreed to step aside before the primaries, saying to all that he’d done his job — beating Trump in 2020 — and now it was time to hand the presidency to his trusted lieutenant, by doing so allowing her the time and space needed to carve out a presidential presence. Whether even in that scenario President Harris would have stood a chance against Trump is another matter entirely, but the handover would have at least demonstrated political coherence. And dignity. Both of which are missing now.[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
