Patterico's Pontifications

7/8/2024

The Democrats’ Joe Biden Conundrum [Updated]

Filed under: General — JVW @ 3:47 pm



[guest post by JVW]

The long holiday weekend has done nothing to assuage Democrats that Joe Biden will be capable of mounting a robust summer and fall campaign. In fact, calls for him to step down have only seemed to increase, especially after a disastrous call-in to the insipid Morning Joe show on MSNBC where the President let his grouchy and unpleasant side out and bitched to the hosts — both of whom will support the Democrat nominee come hell or high water — that they shouldn’t be asking him to demonstrate at least a little bit of cognition and sentience in his daily interactions. (It’s interesting that earlier this year we discovered that “Morning Joe” is to the 46th President what “Fox and Friends” was to the 45th. Is it too much to ask that we have a President who is not a senior citizen watching rage news television?)

The President followed up later in the morning by releasing a two-page letter addressed to “Fellow Democrats.” I read it anyway; so sue me. Meanwhile, the White House press corps appears to finally be tired of repeatedly being lied to by Democrat administrations who expect complete compliance. Meanwhile, the rest of the pro-Democrat media is starting to understand that they have been complicit in covering up President Biden’s frailty and bewilderment and are overcompensating by reporting on important stories they had previously left to conservative media. Meanwhile, senior White House staffers are suggesting that Joe Biden needs to step down. The vultures are circling, and Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who is said to have a good relationship with the President, had planned to lead a delegation of Congressional Democrats to presumably discuss doing to Joe Biden what Republican members of Congress did to Richard Nixon a half-century ago.

But there is just one problem with dropping Joe Biden from the ticket: he doesn’t plan to go anywhere and nobody can make him leave. Sen. Warner scrapped plans for the meeting, Team Biden has been forceful in insisting that he won’t back down, and Democrats increasingly appear to be stuck with Joe Biden at the top of their ticket. As both pro-Biden and anti-Biden forces have pointed out, removing him is harder than party activists want to pretend. As of right now, the Biden campaign controls 3,866 delegates to his party’s convention, with only 1,976 needed to secure the nomination.

Even if President Biden released all of the delegates from their pledges, it’s hard to see how anyone would quickly and effectively secure the nomination. Democrats such as Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, and others (Polis? Pritzker? Is Betomentum back?) would try to amass the 1,976 delegates in order to clinch a first-ballot nomination at the party’s August 19-22 convention in Chicago. If no candidate can secure a first ballot nomination things get really interesting. According to party rules, the 700-plus “superdelegates” consisting of various elected officials and party activists would then get to vote starting on the second ballot. After all of the controversy among Democrats over superdelegates in both the 2008 and 2016 election campaigns, the last thing the party would need is yet another replay of backroom bargaining determining the party’s fate in 2024.

We’ll see where it goes from here, but if Joe Biden stays at the top of the ticket the Democrats and their media adjunct are going to have a difficult time whipping up excitement for the ticket when they have spent the past eleven days wearing out the panic button. No matter how much they try to tell us that they are united squarely behind Biden/Harris, the public isn’t going to forget how desperately they tried to force the Chief Executive into retirement. Furthermore, the President of the United States will be at a point where his party can’t afford to have him out in public except for the most tightly-managed appearances. His acceptance speech on the convention’s final night will be highly anticipated not because anyone expects him to say anything interesting or inspiring, but because people will legitimately wonder if he can read through the entire text without utterly embarrassing himself. And the September debate between the two candidates — should it not be cancelled — will be a doozy. About the only solace for our 46th President is that his performance probably can’t get any worse. But that is no source of solace for our weary nation, once again facing an absolutely wretched choice of candidates.

UPDATE – Our Adorably Obnoxious Clueless niece has joined the Establishment. She must have really been freaked out by what happened to Jamal Bowman, or else she’s just so tired of those blue-haired kids and their demands for free-this-and-that.

[Note: I changed the original embed Tweet to one with a video of nos sobrina telling us what’s what.]

– JVW


Powered by WordPress.

Page loaded in: 0.0669 secs.