Indulging Octogenarian Egos, Chapter 36

Eighty years ago, amidst the fiercest months of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt was poised to run for a fourth term.  His health was terrible and while the country had its suspicions, it was an era of limited mass communication which allowed FDR and his campaign handlers to hide his condition from voters.  In November 1944, FDR was comfortably reelected to a fourth term...and died five months later.  Fast forward to 2024 and current President Joe Biden's campaign has spent the better part of a year operating as though it's still 1944 until it caught up to them spectacularly last month.  

Ten minutes into the June 28 debate--a debate that Biden requested personally!!--it was clear that the already troubled Democratic campaign was in much more serious trouble than we'd considered.  It was also clear that those closest to Biden--and even those only moderately close to Biden--had advance notice of the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee's cognitive decline.  There's no other explanation for why no Cabinet meeting or press conference had been held so far this calendar year.  Honestly, a modestly attentive 11-year-old could have picked up on Biden's escalating infirmity, and yet the entire Democratic establishment was ready, willing, and able to cover this up for more than a year.  Had it not been for the Trump campaign's willingness to accept an unusually early June debate request from the Biden team, the cover-up would have succeeded until after the conventions when it would have been effectively impossible to replace a spiraling geriatric from running again for the most powerful position in the world.  How the hell did it come to this?

The answer is quite simple.  Despite a long list of very recent neon orange warning signs of the risks associated with deferring to the egos of octogenarians who don't want to relinquish power, Democrats from the President's staff to a near-unanimous slate of Congresspersons to rank-and-file voters in primaries in all 50 states stupidly put their trust in Biden's ego anyway.  Common sense was not allowed into the conversation at any point in the last year, even as geriatric Senators Dianne Feinstein and Mitch McConnell suffered embarrassing and terrifying health episodes broadcast on national TV and, more notably yet, even in the recent aftermath of bequeathing a right-wing supermajority to the Supreme Court because its elder stateswoman rolled the dice on continued ego gratification and it came up snake eyes.  Somehow, even after all of those primal screams from the hands of fate, Democrats put their faith in the suffocating hubris of the gerontocracy largely without question, and as expected the result resembles a tragedy of Shakespearean proportion.

As of this writing, Joe Biden is still the official Democratic nominee for President, but few at this point expect that to hold.  His colleagues and campaign donors that had given him a pass before that debate have since given him the option of the easy way out of his ill-conceived reelection bid. Given that Biden won't take the hint, it seems inevitable that the likes of Schumer, Pelosi, and Jeffries--and potentially even Obama--will defer to taking the hard way next, a public vote of no confidence that will dry up campaign donations and destroy his campaign.  Then what?

The all-but-certain outcome is what seemed like a nightmare scenario a year ago...the ascendancy of bumbling Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket, another unfortunate legacy of bad strategic choices made by Biden dating back four years ago.  Such a scenario is still a nightmare as Harris has all the public relations skills of Pete Rose, but if the Democrats have any hope of turning this calamity around in the next three months, it'll require someone who can prosecute the case against their challenger Donald Trump who by all realistic metrics is running ahead.  Biden clearly isn't up to that job.  But given that Harris's background is as a prosecutor, it's possible that she can. Plenty of others in the party would likely be better at it than Harris, but given that elevating them to the top of the ticket would require the construction of an entirely new campaign infrastructure and starting fund-raising over from scratch with a half-billion-dollar head start for Trump, they are scarcely an option.  There are likely only two realistic options for the Democratic nominee for President and their names are Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Biden has been an above-average President, and I suspect an amateur like myself would be even more impressed by how he's managed the situation in Ukraine if I parsed the details and the crossroads of difficult options he's faced along the way.  None of that matters anymore though, at least if Trump wins in November.  Biden will go down in history as a goat, a guy who didn't know when to call it a day and sabotaged his party's ability to beat a challenger who is dangerous in every possible sense.  Part of me feels sad for Biden about this, but the more I think about it, the more furious I feel toward him for fomenting the totally avoidable political crisis unfolding in real time.  

Obviously Biden, or more likely Harris, could still find a way to win if the tide somehow turns their way or if there's widespread polling error undercounting the anti-Trump vote, but let's be real and put the odds of that at less than 20% right now.  So much is at stake but when it came down to it, averting national catastrophe appears to have taken a back seat to the ego of a selfish old man and the cravenness of those who enabled him.  A second Trump administration is likely on the horizon and plenty of people deserve that fate.  Far more of us did nothing to deserve this fate but are nonetheless poised to suffer it anyway.