The last days, which is fine
In some roundabout way, the ideal outcome for a Biden Presidency and its 2024 Democratic candidacy appears to be in the offing. The problem is enough dust has to be blown up into the air to make its positive outcome moot. Biden did indeed run through the hoops of a re-election bid set up, necessary to have an effective term 1 in a presidency in our ossified system. And so he was carry it to term without the drawbacks of the dreaded “lame duck” status. The bid gets handed over to Kamala Harris, who — well, a better possibility than Stacey Abrams, probably his only other option in 2020 as looking at her Abrams has fewer escapes into broader appeal — and at least a chunk of the political campaign machinery for 2024 does not need to be uprooted. I trust that even right this minute the DNC campaign workers have their vaulted workers at the grindstone in those seven states across the rustbelt and sunbelt, able to nimbly pull down the Biden poster and stick up the Harris one.
It also avoids the nature of a party nomination process in the age of social media, which looking at the 2020 process of 2019 — and maybe some things will move off kilter here — is not a trustworthy process. Kicks off a lot of dust and candidates lose their message by way of staff’s social media fights. The ideal on that is the 2007 — 2008 campaign, which by “campaigning in all 57 states” (not really — he slipped West Virginia, for instance) did aid Obama. But 2024 is a looooong way from 2008.
The writing is on the wall. The Democratic bigwigs have decided, rightly or wrongly I cannot say, that it is not worth keeping from damaging Biden in efforts to displace him, because they cannot move forward with him anyways. Pelosi is not subtle when she says he will allow Biden to make the right decision, after Biden insists there is no decision. There is no way to massage a Hillary Clinton statement about taking the keys from grandpa. And I am skipping back to a gut level sensation in the outcome of election 2020 as it became clear we were just waiting for votes to get tallied, and before Trump carried through his long seeded plan of a Plan B in case he lost the election — a bad feeling — something that careful observers of the 1976 Carter victory had to feel — which was, this was a coalition hard to hold. The “he’s too old, but” will easily slide to dropping before the comma. Old white men in the rust belt apt to stumble to The Republicans off of trans athletes, urban crime shots on social media, and high prices. The stupidly comical thing is that the Democrats benefited from him being out of sight in the interim, not the full definition of the party as Trump is the Republican Party right now, thus a massive overperformance of expectations — a thing that always kept Biden in hold. because of the fickleness of the two party system, there is that special place in Hell for Mitch McConnell on his post January 6th cynicism, even though ironically he had showered down on him by the RNC Trumpistas. He kept the man politically alive.
Random observation from an x (twitter) er:
If the United States loses its democracy, it’ll be the dumbest slide into authoritarianism in history.
Others cases had mass unemployment, a major war, something.
None have done it with low unemployment, rising real wages, declining crime, and no troops fighting in foreign wars.
Yeah. Well.