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President Joe Biden told the American people on Wednesday night that he had graciously decided to withdraw from the 2024 election because he wanted to unite his party and focus on his job as president. It was nonsense.
In the most obvious display of sheer political muscle, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her disciples forced President Biden to withdraw from the presidential race.
It was an incredible performance and unprecedented in American history.
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There is a good case to be made that the debate with President Donald Trump showed that Biden was not capable of running a national campaign. From a cognitive ability standpoint, there is good reason to expect Biden to step down as president as well.
However, the way party bosses forced President Biden to resign has serious implications for the American system.
In some ways, Pelosi's behavior is nothing new. She has become a kind of superboss of the Democratic Party. Remember, this is the Democratic leader who told members of Congress that they had to vote for the Affordable Care Act before they could read it. She was a remarkably effective House speaker. Her ability to get her way with a narrow majority was astonishing.
Those years of power acquisition served to force President Biden to relinquish power.
Pelosi orchestrated mounting pressure on Biden to convince him he had no choice.
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President Biden was clearly forced to withdraw as a presidential candidate. He had no realistic alternative. Pelosi was to unveil this week a wave of new House and Senate members who would call on him to withdraw. She had made it clear that she could go slow or tough, but she was going to go.
One of the challenges left by the Biden bosses-led collapse is that the bosses then defined the almost certain candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Patrick Basham of the Democracy Institute conducted a poll on the ground as this drama unfolded. His results are instructive and pose a significant challenge to Democrats. Among all Americans, 61 percent believe the method used to force President Biden to resign was undemocratic. Only 29 percent thought it was democratic to force him to resign.
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When asked about replacing President Biden with Vice President Harris, the results were similar. Sixty percent of Americans, versus 32 percent, considered that imposing Harris on the list of candidates was undemocratic. Interestingly, this feeling was widespread. Among Democrats, 55 percent thought it was undemocratic for her to replace Biden as the presidential candidate. Among independents, this feeling of injustice reached 65 percent. Of course, among Republicans, the vast majority, 79 percent, considered her nomination to be rigged. However, it should be noted that in this poll, the majority of Democrats, independents, and Republicans believed that nominating Harris in this way was undemocratic.
According to this poll, it is clear that Vice President Harris can legitimately be considered the party bosses' candidate. She has never won a delegate. Even in her 2020 campaign, she dropped out early. This reinforces the idea that she has no appeal to the base. She is only attractive to elites, who feel she is useful in defeating Trump.
The dramatic changes of the past few days still leave two major challenges for Democrats.
First, if President Biden is cognitively incapable of campaigning, how can he still be president? His withdrawal from the presidential campaign reinforces the argument that he poses a national security risk as commander-in-chief.
Democrats will want this problem to go away, but if cognitive decline is progressive (and there are two or three clear examples in the coming months), the pressure to replace him may increase dramatically. It will undoubtedly be a distraction for Democrats and a question that citizens will increasingly ask their representatives and senators.
Second, Vice President Harris is far to the left of President Biden.
When he was in the Senate, he voted to the left of Senator Bernie Sanders.
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On illegal immigration, Harris is far more radical than Biden. In April 2015, she told the San Francisco Chronicle that “an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.” As a presidential candidate, she told the Washington Post that she would seek to repeal criminal penalties for people caught crossing the border. “She has been an enthusiastic cheerleader for every major Biden policy that increased the deficit and inflation.
On taxes, Harris favors a higher corporate rate than Venezuela's.
But Harris will turn out to be a much better candidate than Republicans believe. As California's district attorney and attorney general, she was an effective litigator. In the Senate, she was an aggressive questioner, especially of U.S. Supreme Court nominees.
She reminds me of some athletes who are excellent in games but mediocre in practice. The vice presidency was a training session, and she lounged through it, letting her laughter be a central symbol. Now she'll be in the real game. She may be surprisingly better than Washington Republicans expect.
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Harris will also have the advantage of assembling a team of Obama veterans. The opportunity to defeat Trump will draw them into the campaign. If she listens to them, she will be formidable.
The period from the attempted assassination of President Trump until now has been astonishing. It is not going to get any easier or more predictable.
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