A Whole New Ballgame?

Biden's out, and Democrats have a very important decision to make.

There have been unappreciated victims of the absolutely insane news-cycles our nation has gone through over the last week and a half. They’re called political columnists. Folks like me put lots of time and effort into analyzing our country’s current political situation, and just when we’re about to publish our latest column hoping to make sense of it all, another bombshell drops that alters the entire landscape.

For example, I had just about completed a piece on Sunday afternoon in which I broke down the motivations of the major-party presidential candidates into three categories: ego, spite, and self-pardons. I thought I made a pretty strong case. Then came the colossal news that Joe Biden had withdrawn from race, and in a flash my arguments lost a good chunk of their relevance.

I appreciate your sympathy during this difficult time.

Anyway, before the next chapter in this drama unfolds, I figured I’d toss out some quick thoughts.

Joe Biden did the right thing by ending his candidacy. He’s not mentally fit to serve another term, and he may not even be mentally fit to serve the last six months of his current one. He and his administration did wrong by the party, and more importantly the American public, by covering up his worsening condition for as long as they did. Biden should have announced after the 2022 midterms that he would be a single-term president, and then afforded his party a proper primary. But he chose otherwise, for selfish, unpatriotic, and ultimately delusional reasons.

I’ll give a handful of Democratic leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, some credit. While the pressure they put on Biden to step down was entirely based on the president’s quickly dissolving electoral viability (not his personal health or inability to function), they managed to pull off what I have long called on Republicans to do: bid farewell to the toxic, wholly unfit leader of their party.

Rep. Dean Phillips deserves much more credit than the others, of course, for recognizing the problem early, and taking a big political risk to actually try and do something about it. His efforts made him a whipping boy within the party, but he had it right all along. His snide Democratic colleagues should offer him a big public apology, buy him a nice fruit basket, and thank him for his patriotism.

Now, as it turns out, Donald Trump is the oldest major-party presidential nominee in American history, and we’ll see if Nikki Haley was right back in January, when she predicted, “The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the one who wins this election.”

I suspect it won’t be that easy, for one simple reason: Kamala Harris.

Biden has endorsed his vice president to be his successor, and she’ll likely be the candidate who emerges from next month’s Democratic National Convention with her party’s nomination. That, however, would be a mistake. Not as big of a mistake as if Biden had stayed in, but a mistake nonetheless.

If a political party is going to do something as monumental as strong-arming its sitting U.S. president out of electoral contention, and producing a last-minute nominee to run against a general-election opponent they say is a threat to our democracy, they should choose the best person available. Harris isn’t that person. She proved to be a poor presidential candidate in 2020 (offering silly, hyper-progressive ideas that didn’t even excite Democrats). In the years since, she’s revealed herself to be an ineffectual and unpopular vice president in an administration that was poised to lose in November.

I get it. Logistically, Harris is the natural pick, and her rejection could cause an identity-politics uproar within the party. But as a known commodity already deemed unimpressive (and even grating) by much of the electorate, nominating her would mean rolling the dice come November. On the other hand, if the party nominates any of the successful governors whose names have been tossed around in recent weeks, the Democrats would likely win in a landslide.

Voters want a fresh start. For the Democrats, the hard part is already over. Biden’s out of the race. If they’re serious about defeating Donald Trump, they’ll take things one step further.

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