Just about everybody has come on board now. Nancy Pelosi finally
endorsed Kamala Harris on Monday. (Barack Obama, for reasons known only
to himself, remains in that rarefied region above grubby political
reality where he seems most comfortable.) All of the Squad. All of the
rumored vice-presidential candidates. Many of the money men, and a
whopping parade of small donors. It’s taken a little more than a day.
Democrats just don’t do stuff like this.
The only harshers of the mellow are the “open convention” types, who
have been deprived of the West Wing cosplay of their dreams, and the
Republicans, who have completely lost whatever was left of their minds.
As to the former, Aaron Sorkin has taken back his weird endorsement of
Mitt Romney, which doesn’t necessarily mean I was wrong to suspect that
he got the opinion editors of The New York Times drunk when he sold them
that idea. And the GOP? Well, Speaker Mike Johnson is out there
threatening lawsuits that are transparently meritless even by Republican
standards (and yes, I’m aware of the various walking land mines salted
throughout the federal judiciary) and demanding that the president
resign because he, Speaker Moses, says so. But there’s no better example
of GOP panic than the fact that Stephen Miller, onetime second
runner-up in his town’s Josef Goebbels Lookalike Contest, has become
every first grader who ever lost a game of Chutes and Ladders.
From the
Daily Beast:
“They held a primary!” Miller squealed in response. “People—they had
ballots! They filled out circles that went to the voting booths! They
spent money on advertisements, and as President Trump said, the
Republican Party spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe
Biden. Now they’ve just woke up one morning and said: ‘Never mind, we’re
canceling the entire primary, we’re getting rid of our candidate, and
we’re pretending the election has never even happened and we’re gonna
let donors handpick a new nominee.... They’re publicly admitting that
they are an oligarchy.... This is as full-frontal an attack on American
democracy as we’ve ever seen in the history of America’s major political
parties.”
“It’s no fairrrrrrrrrrrr! Daaaadddddyyyyy!”
Much of the praise directed at President Biden since his withdrawal has
cited the extraordinary patriotism and selflessness of the act, all of
it deserved. But let’s not overlook how deftly the president played the
politics of this unique situation. He timed his withdrawal—and Vice
President Harris’s ascension—perfectly. By dividing the announcement and
his endorsement of Harris into separate stories, he guaranteed at least
two days of glowing coverage to boost the new ticket, during which time
the money could start rolling in, which became yet another day of solid
free media.
However, when this is all over in the fall, the Democrats will need a
serious self-examination of how it all went down. The weeks of
intramural sniping at Biden that culminated in his withdrawal is no less
unforgivable just because it came to a soft landing with everybody
happy. The party needs to look closely at who it allows to exercise that
kind of power over this important decision. Joe Biden isn’t going to be
around forever to do the right thing.
