One year ago today… “Republicans float a quiet conspiracy theory that Biden won’t be on the ballot” (NBC):
Though no incumbent president has declined to seek a second term since Lyndon Johnson in 1969, there is an unfounded conversation among a faction on the political right that goes something like this: Democratic power brokers will intervene at the last minute to replace a weakened 80-year-old Biden with someone else as the party’s nominee.
Let’s go back four years to see what I was writing here….
- Who is the Big Money candidate this year? (Biden got more money and it came from the richest Americans who, of course, became vastly wealthier during the Biden-Harris administration)
- The CDC and our state public health department tell us how to trick or treat
- Do lobbyists support Biden-Harris or Trump-Pence? (photos of the sign forests that people in Bethesda, Maryland and Lincoln, Maskachusetts put up before the election)
- The six-car Donald Trump Express HO-scale train (still available today, now with a 2024 box car!)
- Why can’t people who’ve previously been infected with COVID-19 clean car interiors? (part of the Maskachusetts system for preventing COVID-19 spread in which schools were closed and marijuana stores were open; note that the state ended up with a higher age-adjusted COVID-19 death rate than Florida’s)
- Faith in the Church of Shutdown not shaken by weight gain (“A Boston friend who is about 60 years old recently shared that the 50+ shutdown orders from the Maskachusetts governor had resulted in the loss of her fitness habits, a cessation in her gym visits, a substantial weight gain, and a general feeling of poor health. The shutdown that protected her from Covid-19, in other words, has rendered her far more vulnerable to Covid-19 than she ever was previously…)
- Who has watched Hamilton more than once on Disney+? (same question today! Now that peasants have access to Hamilton are the elites still bragging about having scored $1000/seat tickets? In Denver recently nobody was rushing to buy tickets at $50-250.)
- COVID-19 in the school that shut down to avoid COVID-19 (the teachers can’t go back to work because the students exercised what had previously been considered their First Amendment right to assemble)
- Why can’t Michael Bloomberg run a fleet of abortion buses? (the question is even more relevant today; why aren’t there abortion care buses for pregnant people who live in states that don’t allow abortion care at all stages of a pregnant person’s pregnancy?)
Who knew the party that saved us from Trump insurrection would win through succession instead of democracy. After the support for Kamal, Gavin would have been a sure thing. There might have been some fear of going too far to Calif*, but the voters are surprisingly disillusioned with the Calif* way of life after all leaving.
Right-wing types loved the Michelle Obama conspiracy. This was something you heard non-stop on right-wing sources but never heard on left-wing sources.
It was a commonly stated hope among the lefties on the reddit politics subs that Michelle would take Biden’s spot.
David: maybe the Democrats should have listened more carefully to the “right-wing types” you cite! I’m guessing that Michelle Obama would appeal to more voters than Kamala Harris does. Americans seem to accept the idea that having sex with the president, at least occasionally, makes a person qualified to be president, or at least senator. (See Hillary Clinton, for example.) Michelle Obama’s literary output is far ahead of Kamala Harris’s. See https://www.cbsnews.com/news/princeton-releases-michelle-obamas-senior-thesis/ and https://www.oprahdaily.com/entertainment/books/a41891481/michelle-obama-book-the-light-we-carry-interview/ and https://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/oprah-winfrey-presents-becoming-michelle-obama and https://www.oprahdaily.com/entertainment/books/a61763768/michelle-obama-book-overcoming-details/
Kamala’s poor political skill has been dominant fact for years.
She did so badly in 2019 she had to drop out before any voting started.
She was added to the ticket because they needed diversity, but the Biden team didn’t have any confidence in her, so they kept her away from interviews.
There’s some speculation that Joe chose to run a second time in part because he thought the obvious replacement (Kalama) was too weak to win.
When it came time to replace Joe, there were two arguments made: (1) replacing Kamala would break the coalition apart, and (2) there’s no time for bringing in someone else.
Michelle Obama might have solved this problem, but: (1) Michelle doesn’t like politics and doesn’t want the job, and (2) nobody thought you could just pick a person as the replacement without a process.
But replacing the president with the VP is totally natural. That’s really her only job.
If she loses, it will reflect what all the insiders knew about her.
If she wins, Democrats will be embarrassed by her for another 4 years, they’ll be asking themselves “How do we get rid of her and avoid the 2028 loss?”
She’s a mistake that keeps generating pain.
My guess is that a lot of those Democrats now believe that they could have found someone better than Kamala Harris for the swap.
Not sure if any of Obamas would be terribly good for Israel, especially now. I’d speculate that even Kamala, our next president, may be better in this regard, but who knows..
It does seem improbable that they could even find someone more unlikeable than Hillary Clinton, but they are probably so deeply immersed in the hectoring schoolmarm culture that they failed to consider likeability.
Their ideology significantly limits the thoughts that they allow themselves to think, but one of the few premises that they could entertain without being guilty of crimethink was “Hillary Clinton lost because people are intimidated by Smart Women,…,.” Having accepted that premise, they took it to its logical conclusion: “…so let’s run a retard.”
To be fair, they ~did~ manage, with the help of the Party media, to install a vegetable last time.
Probably a good time to re-watch “Being There”.
Amazing also on this one how quickly it went through the cycle of “it’s not happening” to “it is happening and it’s a good thing” to “you’re a sexist/racist/bigot if you don’t like it”. Usually that takes a few months/years, but this one was complete in just a week.
Every DNC phaithful I’ve spoken to about it is now parroting the programmed party line of “party nominations were never a democratic process, the party always did whatever it needed to do to win” (a few hundred years of evidence to the contrary not relevant).