As many have expected, Joe Biden has withdrawn from the presidential race. His timing is perfect to allow a high-stakes event at the convention next month where the party’s new candidate will be anointed (which I predicted here, here, here). All evidence suggests that he didn’t withdraw willingly, and some have even theorized that the announcement went out without his approval or knowledge. Whether the latter is true or not is largely irrelevant, because what appears certain is that Biden was the victim of a coup orchestrated by several nefarious conspirators.
The situation reminds me of an iconic scene in Frank Herbert’s Dune. After having been granted control of the highly profitable and strategically important planet of Arrakis, Duke Leto Atreides was betrayed by the former overseer of Arrakis, Baron Harkonnen, who conspired against him. Paralyzed and facing his inevitable demise as the Baron torments him, Duke Atreides bites into a fake tooth which releases a cloud of toxic gas into the room, which kills everyone in the room except the baron.
Biden did much the same to Obama and the Democrat establishment. With the last gasp of his campaign, he emphatically endorsed Kamala Harris to replace himself on the ticket. He simultaneously ended his own political future while severely wounding the enemies who conspired against him.
Biden’s endorsement triggered a domino effect of other endorsements, most importantly from James Clyburn and Congressional Black Caucus members. But while Barack Obama praised Biden’s choice to exit the race, he and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have all declined to endorse Kamala Harris as of this writing.
Biden’s brain may be turning to mush, but I’d wager there’s enough of the former slippery tactician left in there to know that the Democrat establishment are also conspiring to replace him with someone other than Kamala Harris. And Biden just made that incredibly difficult for them.
Why the establishment wouldn’t want Kamala headlining the ticket isn’t difficult to understand. She is uniquely unlikeable, despite her traits which would ostensibly make her intersectional gold on the Left. This is true even among her own party, as is evident by her quick exit from the 2020 presidential campaign. Her “once promising campaign that began with an explosion of enthusiasm,” NBC reported in December of 2019, “fizzled quickly” — but not before she was able to land some memorable haymakers on Joe Biden in the debates, framing him as a dangerous racist who rubbed elbows with segregationists and opposed racial integration of schools.
She went on to experience similar a similar freefall in support after becoming Joe Biden’s diversity pick for vice president. Despite enjoying a net positive approval in early 2021, by June the honeymoon was quickly over. She was mired in controversy over her inept approach to the “diplomatic mission of solving the “root causes” of migration,” and fueled further by a painful interview with Lester Holt in which she bristled at his observation that she had not even been to the border.
approval rating inverted and never recovered. But upon announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 campaign, Biden’s team posted on X:
My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year.
Biden and Harris have long been adversaries, so it’s difficult to imagine that would genuinely endorse her so emphatically, and it would be even more difficult to imagine that Joe Biden thinks that Harris would give Democrats the best path to victory in 2024. She is a wildly unlikeable prosecutor from the failed city of San Francisco, emblematic of the uber-progressive failed state of California, and her chances of winning over the hearts and minds of voters in Midwestern swing states is next to nil. Since victory in November cannot be the reason for it, one must question Biden’s motive endorsing her.
In my opinion, Obama, Schumer, and Pelosi have been trying to replace Joe in order to prevent more moderates from fleeing the rapidly shrinking Democrat tent in droves as they have been, and Biden just pulled the pin of a political grenade inside the tent.
Opening the convention to other candidates has always presented risks. There are questions about how the Biden-Harris war chest would be spent if Biden or Harris is not the nominee, for example. The party would obviously be open to accusations of racism and sexism if Harris is replaced as the seemingly rightful successor to Biden’s position on the ticket. And there have long been suggestions by Democrats that replacing Biden is a refutation of the democratic will of the party’s voters, expressed clearly in the primary process.
All this has just become far more complicated now that Biden, the democratically chosen nominee, has given his explicit blessing to Kamala Harris.
We’re in uncharted waters, as nothing like this has ever happened before in American history. But what we do know is that Kamala is extremely unlikely to win in November, and that leapfrogging her with a white man, for example, will be seen as heresy from the woke Left.
That’s not to say they can’t do it, of course. Democrats have shown these past three presidential election primaries that they have no regard for the will of their voters, having rigged the 2016 and 2020 primaries against Bernie Sanders, and now having pressured the democratically selected candidate in 2024 to step down.
Some, like Left-leaning pollster Nate Silver, think that Democrats should run Kamala while focusing all energy and money on down-ballot races to mitigate the bleeding. That makes logical sense, but I don’t think Democrats have any interest in losing in 2024. The concern for me, as it long has been, is that they bring out the only candidate who can mitigate the cost of replacing a black woman on the ticket, who brings with her substantial name recognition, and has largely been unscathed by political attacks in these past years — none other than Michelle Obama. The choice continues to be logical to fully count her out.
Image: AT via Magic Studio
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