Pierce

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.