Amid the Democrats’ chaotic response to the Big Question — can President Joe Biden run for a second term — some things are crystal clear. One is that although most party faithful are falling into line after two weeks of rebellion, almost none of them really believes Biden is up to the job.
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), for example, was one of four congressional Democrats among an advance guard saying last weekend that Biden must step down, yet now, with a tone of resignation, he concedes, “He’s going to be our nominee, and we all have to support him.”
“Have to support him” is not a ringing endorsement. It’s no more than a shamefaced acceptance. Like everyone in his party, Nadler knows he’s backing a man manifestly incompetent for the high office he holds, who cannot revive because his mental meltdown in the debate wasn’t due to a curable illness and who will inevitably get more feeble and less able to cope with the strains of leading at home and abroad. Biden is declining fast, and the slide is noticeable not just each year or each month, but almost each week and day.
Democrats “have to support him” because Biden secured 9 out of every 10 convention delegates in the primaries and cannot be dislodged involuntarily, and he has made it plain, as he said to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, that he’ll keep running unless “the Lord almighty [comes and says] ‘Joe, get outta the race.’”
Invoking intervention by the almighty may be unwise given how close Biden is to that encounter in election circumstances or otherwise. But it shows he’ll fight party pressure, or that Dr. Jill, Hunter, and the rest of his inner circle won’t allow capitulation. They enjoy the perks of power, and who can blame them? Some of them, after all, have been selling it for millions of dollars over the years.
But even though Democrats are closing ranks, they are not slamming the door on an alternative nominee. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told MSNBC on Wednesday that Biden “has to make that decision because time is running short.” That’s an odd formulation given that Biden has already made his decision and started this crucial week with an unequivocal and defiant letter to House Democrats refusing to stand aside.
So, Biden probably isn’t going away, and yet everyone knows he cannot run the country for another four years. (He isn’t really running it now but is, rather, tottering to the tune of family members, close officials, and party bigwigs who tell him what to do.)
There is an inescapable conclusion, and one must face it. The fact that Democrats know Biden cannot lead the nation but are nevertheless backing him means they are making mental arrangements for the inauguration of President Kamala Harris.
If Biden manages to beat former President Donald Trump and takes the oath of office but dies in office or sinks into total dotage before 2028, Harris would step into the Oval Office automatically. Her favorable-vs.-unfavorable numbers are nearly as deeply underwater as Biden’s, and she has shown herself an even less capable election campaigner. But she stands to inherit the presidency without ever having to win over voters to that appalling idea.
That may be the Democrats’ ultimate calculation. If they can’t ditch Biden, they might be able to shove him over the election finish line and have him vacate the Oval Office early in his second term, giving Harris two or three years of incumbency — perhaps even more, as was the case for Harry Truman in 1945.
It is a breathtakingly antidemocratic calculation but wholly in line with the Left’s and the Democrats’ now-habitual preference for governing without input from the public. They are already talking about the election being less about Biden than about choosing a team. The Biden presidency, like the Obama presidency, has seen a massive shift in the party toward treating America’s citizens as deplorable plebs who cannot be trusted with the task of self-government, which is essential to a democratic republic.
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More and more decisions that Americans are supposed to make, which are necessary for sovereign control, are being pried from their grasp and given to an unelected oligarchy in Washington, the permanent civil service, the deep state — whatever you wish to call it.
It would be completely on brand for these people, contemptuous of the public for whom they supposedly work, to try to install a fading figurehead in the White House at the start of a second term knowing he’d soon give them an opportunity to anoint the first woman president. She would owe her elevation to the fact that she checked the woke boxes on race and gender, and she would also owe it to the cynical Democrats who want to run the country with as little democracy as possible.