I’ve told this story here before, about a lesson I learned (one of many) from my teacher, mentor and first boss, Arnold Bennett.
One day we were having lunch with a prospective client who was planning a run for Congress in Florida. The young state legislator had the next decade mapped out—a few terms in Congress, a challenge to an incumbent Senator, and the VP slot on a future presidential ticket.
When I expressed a little surprise at our new client’s certainty, Arnold said that in his experience, everyone who’d ever been elected to anything had a plan to be President, and the ones who lacked relentless ambition only wanted to be Speaker of the House.
As you listen to experts, pundits and reporters spin scenarios for replacing President Biden as the nominee, think about whether that kind of all-consuming ambition, focus and drive among the dozens of Democrats who look in the mirror and see a President would easily evaporate when the “powers that be,” (whoever they are) decide the party needs to unite around one person, and quickly.
I can see a case for that being Vice President Kamala Harris, but no one else. I’m glad to see her getting more respect and attention and have long maintained that should there be a vacancy at the top of the ticket, the only way to avoid a damaging clusterf@*! of self-obsessed Democrats is to pass the baton to the person who’s next in line.
But instead we’re seeing more stories with headlines like this, from The Atlantic:
Democrats Should Pick a New Presidential Candidate Now
The party needs to wake up and stop sleepwalking toward disaster with Biden as its nominee.
Really? How would that work, exactly? Do Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Kamala Harris, Gretchen Whitmer, and whoever else fancies their chances draw straws? Go on Dancing With the Stars? Invent a new primary and run in it? Seriously, how would replacing Joe Biden work at this point in the calendar?
(no relation) made some waves with his New York Times essay, “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden.” He calls for an “open convention” which is something we hear about all the time. A “brokered convention” was predicted for one of the parties in 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 2008 and 2016 and 2020.Klein’s list of potential contestants in “Dancing With The Presidential Contenders” includes,
Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore, Jared Polis, Gavin Newsom, Raphael Warnock, Josh Shapiro, Cory Booker, Ro Khanna, Pete Buttigieg, Gina Raimondo, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chris Murphy, Andy Beshear, J.B. Pritzker — the list goes on.
He speculates that
Some of them would make a run at the nomination. They would give speeches at the convention, and people would actually pay attention. The whole country would be watching the Democratic convention, and probably quite a bit happening in the run-up to it, and seeing what this murderer’s row of political talent could actually do. And then some ticket would be chosen based on how those people did.
Again—really? How would that work? How would “some ticket” be chosen exactly? How would that be anything but chaotic?
There might be a “brokered convention” this summer, but it won’t be the Democrats. As I’ve written before in this space, if Donald Trump goes into the convention as a convicted felon awaiting sentencing, and polls show that he is not only losing badly to Joe Biden in those swing states but is dragging previously-safe Republican Senators down with him, watch for the Convention to look around for someone who wouldn’t be a total disaster.
Maybe they stipulate that their nominee can’t be facing multiple 20-year prison sentences, or that he has to be able to construct a coherent sentence.
(Which would ultimately be bad for Joe Biden, so never mind. Forget I said that.)
Before calling for a 36-hour Democratic cluster-you-know-what on national TV this summer, Ezra Klein includes his version of what I said earlier:
Call it the Kamala Harris problem. In theory, she should be the favorite. But she polls slightly worse than Biden. Democrats don’t trust that she would be a stronger candidate. But they worry that if she wasn’t chosen it would rip the party apart. I think this is wrong on two levels.
First, I think Harris is underrated now. I’ve thought this for a while. I’ve said this before, that I think she’s going to have a good 2024.
He goes on with some “but…” and “if only” language that won’t thrill the Vice President, and calls on her to convince the delegates that “she has the best shot at victory.” He doesn’t think it would “rip the party apart” to have an open convention but I’d rather not take that chance.
As I’ve said here before, I think much of what disturbs people about Joe Biden’s “age” is really about his walk. If you missed the news nugget I passed along earlier, it turns out,
“His gait is somewhat halting, a characteristic multiple people close to the White House say is partly because of his refusal to wear an orthopedic boot after suffering a hairline fracture in his foot before taking office.”
If he didn’t walk like an old man, and fumble around so much at the microphone, we’d probably remember Joe Biden as the tried and true “gaffe machine,” we’ve all gotten used to, and not be so worried when he screws up some dates.
After all, the choice is between a highly competent and accomplished President who is old and, well, the guy I compared to the character Peter Sellers played in the movie “Being There.”
So I was glad to read what
, whose public-editor columns I admired in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post (O print editions of newspapers! O lost!), wrote following up on her earlier column about Joe Biden’s age in which she wrote,Biden’s advanced age is, granted, far from ideal for a president seeking a second term, even the very effective president that he has been. Yes, he’s old; and, never a gifted public speaker, he makes cringe-inducing mistakes. It would be great if he were 20 years younger. His age really is a legitimate concern for many voters.
Now, Sullivan writes:
Dahlia Lithwick at Slate saw it as I did, and I appreciated her nod to my column in her recent piece, “The Real Way to Think about Biden’s Age This Run.” She summarized the situation: “So now Americans face the problem that Biden is old, while Trump is an authoritarian who wants to ‘create a private red-state army under the president’s command.’”
Folks should stop going on television and saying what Joe Biden or the Democrats “should do,” and not respond to every bad headline with more schemes to reinvent the presidential nominating process on the fly.
Panic when the Supreme Court grants Trump total immunity. Don’t think that will happen? Neither do I. Then, get ready for the federal trial—and see what changes when Trump no longer controls the narrative.