As Tim Balk of The New York Times reported on Tuesday
Hillary Clinton suggested in a new interview that the
Democratic Party’s loss in 2024 boiled down to a “terrible miscalculation” —
President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s decision to run for re-election.
At an event in Manhattan on Monday, Mrs. Clinton told The
New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, that Mr. Biden had made a “terrible mistake
for himself, his legacy and for the country” in trying to run again at age 81.
If Mr. Biden had decided to “pass the torch” and the
Democratic Party had held a competitive presidential primary, Mrs. Clinton told
Mr. Remnick, “whoever emerged from that contest — whether it was the vice
president, or a governor, or a senator or anybody else — would have beaten
Donald Trump.”
Chris Cillizza acknowledges that there has been a bit of a rivalry between Biden and Clinton but believes that the latter was correct to note that the President should have bowed out considerably earlier than he did. However, he argues also (at 7:20)
Now, would someone who emerged in an open primary process had Biden dropped out in the summer of 2023- would that person have definitely beaten Donald Trump in November of 2024?
No, I think there was sigificant unhappines with the state of the econnomy, with Democrats, with Joe Biden in particular, with how he had led the economy, how much he understood about the economy. So I don't think it would have- it's not just an easy fix, that they just nominate somebody else in an open primary process and that person beats Donald Trump. But the way that it played out by Biden staying too long, he should never have run for a second term, staying on for too long, the debate, the three weeks of is he going to stay on, is he going to get out- and eventually he gets out and Kamala Harris steps in without any primary or anyone voting on anything, that clearly doomed them, right?
Wrong.
Cillizza adds "I'm not sure the Democrats would have won anyway but the way that played out doomed them.
"
Of course we don't know if the new candidate, assuming it was not the Vice President, would have won. And Cillizza, admittedly, reflects conventional wisdom, as does The Times' Balk, who wrote "Mr. Biden ultimately left the race in late July 2024, immediately putting his weight behind Ms. Harris, his vice president, but leaving her just three months to build her own campaign before Election Day."
Do you see what they're doing? In the case of Cillizza- a straight shooter- it is unintentional, and perhaps also in case of The Times.
It's in the title of Harris' memoir about the general election campaign. Whether it was the decision of the ex-candidate, the publicher or someone else, the title of the book was 107 Days, in part as an argument that the Vice President faced an uphill battle to win the election.
But she did not. Almost to the moment that Biden dropped out, the nomination of Harris was a fait accompli. In a review of her book, Vanity Fair explained that on that day
By 10 p.m. at the Naval Observatory, jigsaw pieces were
still strewn across the kitchen table. But the puzzle of Harris’s nomination
had been solved. She’d called more than 100 people. Not a single potential
rival had challenged her. By Monday, Harris had the backing of a majority of
Democrats in Congress. Within 48 hours she had the support of most delegates
who would be at the convention. A senior adviser summed up Harris’s two-day
marathon as a political tour de force: “A lot of people were like, ‘We need a
process.’ Well, there is a process: getting the delegates to commit. We just
needed to do it and we did it.”
Aside from incumbents, most candidates for a presidential nomination- especially in the Democratic Party- have to run a gauntlet before securing sufficient delegates. Not so, Kamala Harris, behind whom most prominent Democrats, including virtually any possible challenger, quickly lined up. The national convention was highly successful, Harris won her debate with Trump going away, the Party was united behind the nominee, enthusiasm was impressive, and victory seemed likely. However
One hundred seven days later, as history will recount, Team
Harris hit rock bottom. Yet it didn’t seem so as Election Day dawned. Though
Harris was behind in the battleground states, her spokespeople were oddly
upbeat. Appearing on MSNBC back on October 27, campaign chair Jen O’Malley
Dillon had declared, “We are very confident we’re going to win this thing.” On
Friday, November 1, senior adviser David Plouffe posted on X that
late-breaking undecided voters were going for Harris by more than 10 points.
A campaign has a gravitational pull, and chief of staff
Voles was feeling it. “You get sucked into the momentum,” she said. “Like you
believe it. I’ve been on winning ones and losing ones, and this felt more like
[Bill] Clinton’s [in 1992] than [Michael] Dukakis’s [in 1988].” Voles wasn’t
talking poll numbers or analytics, but intangibles. “The rallies were so big
and so enthusiastic. People were lining the streets.” But Harris’s pollsters
didn’t share the kumbaya cohesion.
Although Biden should have withdrawn from the race earlier, his failure to do so did not doom his replacement on the ticket- far from it. Harris had a great opportunity to win, especially given that the GOP had less timefor opposition research about her than it would have if it had been clear for months that she would be the nominee. It was not the brief nature of the campaign nor the quality of her campaign; it was her.
After she lost to Donald Trump in 2016, Hillary Clinton could have opted to seek a rematch. However, she realized that she might not win the 2020 nomination and if she did, couldn't be certain that she'd win the general election. She understood the limits to her popularity and electability.
Individuals in or around Joe Biden in 2023 and the first half of 2024 refused to warn the President that he was old and appeared too feeble to mount a successful campaign for re-election. Now Harris, she of the "107 days," is reportedly eyeing a run for the 2028 presidential nomination. Self-awarness is not her strength. The Democratic Party cannot afford another loss. For the good of the Party, someone needs to read Kamala Harris the riot act.
There have been dozens of reasons asserted to explain the descent of the national Democratic Party the last several years. One rarely if ever mentioned, but hinted at in this CNN article of 1/21/21, is
Former South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Jaime Harrison
has officially been elected the next chair of the Democratic National
Committee, winning the organization’s election after President Joe Biden
selected him for the top political job.
Harrison, who unsuccessfully ran for the Senate in 2020,
will now be asked to guide the top committee at a time when Democrats have
control of all three key bodies in Washington, the White House, the Senate and
the House of Representatives.
As with everyone else, I didn't recognize the impact this would have on the national party. And unlike almost everyone aside from Chris Cillizza, I do know now.
She built a Presidential campaign from scratch, chose a VP in two weeks, and pulled off one of the most successful Democratic convention in decades in under a month.
She crushed an opponent who has stood on more presidential debate stages than anyone in history. She energized… https://t.co/e3PQLrgkPQ
I haven't read Cillizza's full response to Harrison's tweet, for which a subscription to the journalist's Substack is necessary. Nonetheless, one thing is clear: Cillizza believes Kamala Harris was a bad candidate and Jaime Harrison believes she was not, or at least pretends to believe that.
It's not that Harrison is wrong about everything. He's right about several things, ironically thereby proving Cillizza's theory and disproving his own.
The then-Vice President did "pull off" an extremely successful convention. She "crushed an opponent" in debate, "energized an electorate," and "raised a billion dollars in just 107 days." Further, she was an extremely well-qualified candidate in that she possessed an excellent resume: top law enforcement official in a big city, top law enforcement officer in our largest state, a US Senator representing our largest state, and Vice-President of the USA.
Taken as a whole, that is extremely impressive.
Nevertheless, those were elements of her campaign- the fund-raising: well-executed, exciting rallies; tremendous debate performance. None of those go to whom Kamala Harris is.
She did have only 107 days, as the title of her new, controversial memoirs,"107 Days," not so subtly remind us. Those were 15-16 weeks to persuade voters that they should not return to office an individual who had been defeated for re-election four years earlier by someone generally believed no longer to have the full capacity (whether cognitive or physical) to run the country for another four years.
The former Senator was handed a gift. She did not have to run a gauntlet of primaries, in which she would have been tempted to take stands and make statements endearing her to a Democratic primary electorate but which would have been fodder for the opposing party in a general election.
Moreover, there is no assurance that Harris would have won the nomination if contested in that traditional manner. She entered the presidential race in 2019 and could not advance even to the first primary or convention. The Californian certainly tried hard enough, even winning plaudits from the political crowd for describing rival candidate Joe Biden as a racist without branding him as a "racist." Slick.
That strategic tour de force unsurprisingly brought a lot of money into her campaign coffers, though upon further review, we learned that she herself had expressed a similar view of mandatory school busing. It was a masterful performance by Harris, though eventually registered Democrats recognized who she was and she was done.
Done, but not finished. Persuaded by US Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, who was in Democratic House leadership and a friend of former Vice President Biden, to select a black woman as his running mate, the nominee selected Ms. Harris. Jill Biden was reportedly incensed by Harris' attack in debate upon her husband and therefore opposed her husband's decision, proving that sometimes, mother does know best.
The vice presidential nominee had minimal or no effect upon the presidential race in 2020. President Biden thereafter put her in charge of border policy, enabling critics to label her "czar." Her ineptitude and bad presidential policy- the latter probably a greater factor- led to a remarkable upsurge in illegal border crossings and requests there for asylum, which played a major role in November 2024.
After Biden dropped out of that race, Harris became the default Democratic presidential nominee. She already was vice president, thus arguably heir apparent, and she is black. Yet, well before then, as of early September of 2023, there was talk about the possibility of the Biden-Harris ticket being challenged for the 2024 nomination. However, according to this little-noticed, yet extremely significant article from NBC News at the time, "longtime Democratic strategist" Karen Finney stated
When you had people who were trying to test the waters, the party rose up and made it clear to those individuals- who were mostly white men- that to disrespect the vice president would not be well received by women and people of color within the party. They got a little bit of a smack in the face.
The message was- and is- clear: that irrespective of any other factors, Kamala Harris had to be on the ticket for reasons (demographic) beyond her, or anyone's control. She was entitled to it, whether she would be an effective successor as President to Joe Biden, a net benefit in the campaign, or anything else.
Fortunately for her- vice president, after all- she was able to escape the scrutiny of the media, rival candidates, and others inevitable during a primary campaign. And even then, she may have lost. In the video below, a well-meaning Wisconsin reader maintains (at 2:40) "it was a very short amount of time for the Party to get its act together before the election and had President Biden decided not to run sooner, I think that Vice President Harris would have had a better chance."
It (with her help) did get its act together, she was polling better than Trump, and then the voters got to know her better. So, no.
We cannot know how Kamala Harris would have fared in a primary race. However, we all saw her fail on ABC'sThe View, CBS' 60 Minutes, and with Dana Bash on CNN. She doesn't think well on her feet, an attribute common to many of us who don't run for public office.
That wasn't her campaign; that was her. She is weak in some formats, is substandard as a retail politician, and seems to feel entitled. A sense of entitlement is common in politicians but unlike most of them, Harris is unable to hide it.
Little of that seems to be pertinent to Jaime Harrison. Oh, but it is. In the last sentence of his response to Chris Cillizza, the ex-DNC chairman asks rhetorically "what the hell have you done to sit in judgement of our MVP?"
Besides being a citizen of the USA, in which the First Amendment still applies, Cillizza is a veteran journalist, and relatively objective one. He is entitled (being entitled is not bad; having a sense of entitlement is) to his own opinion, an educated one, which often is right, less frequently, wrong.
Harrison's question is bizarre for another reason: he refers to Harris as "our MVP." "MVP" stands for Most Valuable Player. Say what you will about Harris, who would have been an infinitely better President than has Donald Trump. She lost an election, a winnable one, and that hardly qualifies her as an MVP for the Party which Jaime Harrison was appointed to strengthen. There is only one major political party which now supports freedom of speech, and that commitment may flourish a little more with him no longer its leader.
Former President Joe Biden said in a new interview that the
timing of his pullout from the 2024 election wouldn’t have made a difference,
suggesting that Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump was inevitable. (Watch the
video below.)
“Should you have withdrawn earlier?” the BBC’s Nick Robinson
asked in the interview, shared Wednesday.
“I don’t think it would’ve mattered,” Biden replied. “We
left at a time when we had a good candidate. She was fully funded.”
Chris Cillizza disagrees with Biden's first claim, that it would have not mattered); presumably agrees with the second that "we had a good candidate", and ignores the third point, that "she was fully funded." He argues (at 4:39 of the video below)
There was no primary. Biden gets out Harris gets in, that's it. She gets zero actual votes from Democrats to be the Democratic nominee for President. It just got handed off to her. I think that rankled a lot of voters, including a lot of Democrats.
I think- let's imagine Biden gets out a year before. Let's imagine he gets out in June- July 21, 2023. We had a robust primary process at that point. Kamala Harris is in. There probably are other people who run. She might still wind up being the nominee. But it seems to me that that process would have yielded someone who could say "I won this. I campaigned for this and I won the nomination as opposed to it was handed to me by a guy who is not popular and I'm now going to have to own that guy and his record for the entire campaign."
So, all of those things plus the fact that again, an intangible, but it's really hard to set up a presidential campaign on July 21, July 22, whenever Kamala Harris started and try to win an election on November 5, right? It's just a massive undertaking and to do it that late, you are trying to do everything while sprinting and that's never easy. So to me, it's just Joe Biden in a state of denial.
Yet, in early morning on Tuesday, March 5, 2024, Andrew Feinberg of The Independent appeared to capture the zeitgeist, and did capture the vibe, of the campaign when he wrote
Harris, who just a few weeks ago appeared to have run out of
the momentum she’d quickly gathered after President Joe Biden ceded the
Democratic ticket to her this past July, is surging thanks to a series of
late-game missteps by Trump and his allies. Those missteps include the
disastrous decision to include a comedian who called Puerto Rico an “island of
floating garbage” in the lineup at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally late
last month.
On Saturday, renowned pollster Ann Selzer released her
annual survey of Iowa voters which showed Harris with a three-point lead, 47
per cent to 44 per cent, in the Hawkeye State based on an incredibly strong
showing with female voters. Harris, who’d trailed Trump by a four-point margin
among Iowans in September, had also inherited a whopping 18-point deficit when
she took over the Democratic nomination from Biden.
Another national poll released by NPR and Marist College on
Monday showed Harris garnering support from 51 per cent of respondents,
compared with Trump’s 47 per cent — a lead greater than the survey’s 3.5-point
margin of error. And the final NBC News poll of the election cycle showed Trump
hemorrhaging support from Black and Latino voters, while Harris was shown to be
garnering support from 87 per cent of Black voters.
The Harris campaign appears to have met the moment and is
finishing strongly with what it describes as the largest coordinated
get-out-the-vote event in history on Monday.
The campaign is running simultaneous events across all seven
battleground states, including rallies featuring Harris and Minnesota governor
Tim Walz, plus programming tying the events in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan,
Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin together as part of a
national livestream program.
Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters on
a call on Monday afternoon that the coordinated event is intended to “capture
the grassroots enthusiasm that we are seeing everywhere, to focus on mobilizing
our voters heading into Election Day tomorrow”.
“Tomorrow, we’ll have elected officials and performers and
speakers that really reach such a wide network across all social media
platforms, helping to make sure that our message is breaking through in these
final hours to voters that maybe are harder to reach or less engaged. These
events will serve as a massive mobilization and volunteer engagement
opportunity,” she said.
Privately, Democratic sources who spoke to The Independent
are projecting confidence, with one swing-state party chair noting what they
described as “a serious crossover vote among Republicans” and “explosive”
turnout in early voting among key constituencies, including Latinos.
Trump’s response to a Biden gaffe in which the president
appeared to call the ex-president’s supporters “garbage” in return seemed to
have only prolonged the news cycle stemming from Hinchcliffe’s racist diatribe.
His decision to stage a photo op with a garbage truck looks to have failed to
shift the focus back to Biden and instead reminded Latino voters of what had
touched off the controversy to begin with.
And while the Trump campaign had hoped to make hay out of an
Associated Press report revealing that the White House communications team had
tried to doctor the official transcript of Biden’s remarks to make it look as
if he hadn’t said what he’d said, Trump stepped on his own campaign’s messaging
over the weekend with a series of bizarre and unhinged appearances. At one
rally, he even appeared to fellate a malfunctioning microphone.
One Democratic operative suggested that the stars had
aligned to bring about the ex-president’s collapse at the exact time Harris has
been surging.
“Aaron Sorkin couldn’t have written it better,” they said.
Meanwhile, Trump and running mate JD Vance closed out their
electioneering with a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s the same place
where Trump closed out his victorious 2016 run against Hillary Clinton, and
it’s where Trump ended his re-election race against Biden four years later.
Not only is Michigan a key swing state — and Grand Rapids a
historically strong Republican area — but Trump is notoriously superstitious
and has insisted on closing out both of his post-2016 campaigns there for no
reason but vibes, even as he was forced to open his day in North Carolina, a
reliable GOP stronghold that he might well lose to Harris.
At Trump’s appearances this past weekend, the arenas he
visited looked noticeably emptier and the candidate himself looked lost at
times, vacillating between bewilderment and menace. He suggested that an
assassination attempt against him would need to shoot through a packed media
contingent to have a chance at hitting him, in one particularly concerning
moment.
Harris "quickly gathered" momentum "after Joe Biden ceded the Democratic ticket to her this past July. While Democrats were "projecting confidence," Trump "stepped on his own campaign's messaging.... with a series of bizarre and unhinged appearances." Harris was "surging" and combined with "the largest coordinated get-out-the-vote event in history," one Democratic operative boasted "Aaron Sorkin couldn't have written it better."
Democrats were well-funded, organized, disciplined, and confident while the Trump campaign was well-funded and not much else. Nonetheless, Cillizza would maintain
So, all of those things plus the fact that again, an intangible, but it's really hard to set up a presidential campaign on July 21, July 22, whenever Kamala Harris started and try to win an election on November 5. Right? It's just a massive undertaking and to do it that late, you are trying to do everything while sprinting and that's never easy.
It may have been hard but it was done, and impressively, as everyone recognized at the time.. Perhaps the Democratic Party may have won the presidential election if Joe Biden had dropped out a year earlier. However, that would have given the GOP time than it eventually had to batter whomever the presumptive Democratic nominee would have been.
It would have been a better situation for the party's nominee only if the process had yielded someone other than Kamala Harris. That is far from certain, though, and for reason(s) unrelated to the quality of the candidate. In September of 2023- over a year before the November, 2024 election- three NBC reporters noted
A quirk of the 2024 presidential cycle is the chasm that’s
emerged between the party establishment and rank-and-file voters. For
Democrats, more than half don't want to see Biden run again, an April NBC News
poll found.
But those rank-and-file voters counted for little compared to party insiders who were intimidated. The reporters added
Biden allies have not been shy about getting the word out
that it would be self-defeating for ambitious white male candidates like Newsom
to try to snatch the nomination away from Biden and Kamala Harris, who made
history as the first woman and person of color to become vice president….
“When you had people who were trying to test the waters” for
a presidential bid, “the party rose up and made it clear to those individuals —
who were mostly white men — that to disrespect the vice president would not be
well received by women and people of color within the party,” said Karen
Finney, a longtime Democratic strategist. “They got a little bit of a smack in
the face.”
So let's be clear in the manner which can be understood by Cillizza and the other pundits chiming in on the failure to capitalize on the unpopularity of Donald Trump. The Democrats did not lose the White House because Kamala Harris did not have enough time. She came out surging and ran an effective campaign until individuals realized they were being asked to vote for, well, Kamala Harris, an extremely qualified, unlikable person.
The party establishment wanted to anoint her in part in part because she was the sitting vice-president, hence the closest thing to a default candidate. However, the times did not call for nominating someone because it would be easy but for the individual most likely to win. Harris had flamed out in her initial run for the presidency, as a candidate for the nomination in the 2020 cycle, and there was great suspicion that she would not turn out to be a strong candidate.
That turned out to be the case but not for the reason Cillizza claims. Assuming Feinberg of The Independent was not making things up, Harris ran a nearly flawless campaign, one which most people admired at the time, and which was better than could have been expected.
Nonetheless, she lost the general election and the words of Karen Finney, an admirer of Harris, gives more than a clue of why. A challenge to the vice-president, were it to have come from a white male (from any white, more likely) would not have been "well received by women and people of color within the party." Finney wouldn't acknowledge it, but a challenge even from a white female would have been problematic.
This severely narrowed the range of possible alternatives to Biden, which would make Vice-President Kamala Harris the odds-on favorite were the President not to seek a second term. Top Democrats got their preferred candidate, even though nearly everyone suspected she was nowhere near the individual most likely to defeat Trump.
If it makes Cillizza and others feel better, they can continue to blame the November, 2024 loss on Joe Biden. If it impels them not to challenge the prevailing wisdom of the Democratic Party that an individual's value is to be determined in part by the inherited characteristics of race and gender, even better. Ignoring reality can be satisfying to oneself, though destructive to a political party.
In November of 2013, conservative Mark Steyn of the conservative National Review wrote contemptuously
Still, as historian Michael Beschloss pronouned the day after his election, he's "probably the smartest guy ever to become president." Naturally, Obama shares this assessment. As he assured us five years ago, "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors."
In March, 2016 house conservative Niall Ferguson wrote in The Atlantic
It is a criticism I have heard from more than one person who has worked with President Obama that he regards himself as the smartest person in the room- any room. Jeffrey Goldberg's fascinating article reveals that this is a considerable understatement. The president seems to think he is the smartest person in the world, perhaps ever.
It always was a go-to criticism of Barack Obama by Republicans that the President believed he was "the smartest guy in the room." It was a more diplomatic way of slamming a black man than to accuse him of being "arrogant," which appeared to be their real, unspoken criticism of him. From the right-wing Free Beacon(which, perhaps ironically, initially funded what became known as the Steele dossier):
Another incident critics cite is when Obama was still a
Senator from Illinois and traveled to Iraq in 2007. General David Petraeus,
then commanding U.S. forces for the war effort, gave Obama his assessment of
the fight against al Qaeda and how to prosecute it. Obama disagreed with the
general's analysis, arguing that Petraeus had it wrong.
the nerve to question a general? I think the word the Free Beacon was searching for was arrogant.
Funny thing is that Obama may have been the smartest guy in the room, though certainly not overly imbued with fearlessness. Last week, we learned
Former Vice President Kamala Harris was "very
annoyed" with former President Barack Obama as she sought his endorsement
to take former President Joe Biden's spot on the 2024 Democratic ticket, a new
book claims.
"As the hours rolled by, and it became clear that she
was well on her way to seizing the nomination by storm, Obama's opposition to
her grew more confounding," authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes
reported. "Harris was ‘very annoyed’ with him, according to a confidant.
They had plenty of donors and political allies in common. The rest of the party
threw in with her. Where was Obama?"
The book, published earlier this month, is titled
"Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House" and details
how Harris secured the support of key Democrats after Biden dropped out of the
race. The authors revealed that Obama did not want Harris to run in Biden's
place, because he felt she couldn't beat Trump.
In the discussion with MSNBC, Allen stated "President Obama absolutely did not think that Joe Biden should continue, according to our sources close to President Obama."
The former President was correct on both counts. The incumbent President should not have run for re-election. It had been obvious for many months that Biden had lost something off his fastball and that voters would not forgive him as they would forgive opponent Donald Trump, who either physically or mentally (let alone ethically) not right.
And Obama was right that Harris couldn't beat Trump. The then- Vice President wisely ran a campaign emphasizing her strengths and de-emphasizing her weaknesses. Nevertheless, she still didn't win because, ultimately, she was Kamala Harris.
Yet, if Barack Obama had been cast in The Wizard of Oz (fictionally set in the birthplace of his mother), he easily could have played the cowardly lion, albeit without the self-awareness. True to character:
However, Obama spoke with Harris over the next couple of
days, according to the book, and he found he was in a position where "his
actions against Biden and Harris could diminish him in the eyes of Democratic
elites."
Well, that wasn't very bold.
Still Obama, who as Senator dared to question the corrupt David Petraeus, was encouraging a challenge to a candidate who herself thought the nomination was her divine right His counsel- similar to that of James Carville- should have been embraced.
Instead, the Party fell in line with James Clyburn, who quickly endorsed Harris after Biden's exit in order to stave off any momentum for an open primary. The four-year old Win With Black Women leveraged its influence.
The prescience and wisdom the courage. In an interview last week at Hamilton College in New York State, the former President stated
Imagine if I had pulled Fox News’ credentials from the White
House press corps. You’re laughing, but this is what’s happening. Imagine if I
had said to law firms that were representing parties that were upset with
policies my administration had initiated, that you will not be allowed into
government buildings.
We will punish you economically for dissenting from the
Affordable Care Act or the Iran deal. We will ferret out students who protest
against my policies. It’s unimaginable that the same parties that are silent
now would have tolerated behavior like that from me, or a whole bunch of my
predecessors.
I say this not on a partisan basis.
Of course, he didn't say it on a partisan basis. The name "Trump" never crossed his lips. He completely avoided the words "Trump" or "Donald Trump" or "President Trump." It was very Obama-esque.
It's a feat worth admiring. So, too, is Barack Obama's sense that betting on Kamala Harris was a lousy gamble. It's unfortunate that he wasn't bold enough to let more than a few people know at the time.
A co-host on The View, Sara Haines, told (at 4:24 of the
video below) viewers "And I know a ton of people that are not re-writing
this, who may have voted for Donald Trump, that are lifelong Republicans, who
still say January 6 was a disgrace."
I hate to be the one to burst her bubble but they are
blowing smoke up her posterior. Although a few well-educated, affluent
Republicans- who are very likely most of Haines' GOP friends- believe
the insurrection of 1/6/21 was a bad thing, most of them are blowing smoke up
her posterior.
But for sheer overall wrongness, no one on the set could top
Alyssa Farah Griffin, who a moment earlier (at 2:41) had commented
Most Americans were not comfortable with January 6. They
thought it was bad, they thught it was awful. But for four years they said
"guys, we are hurting. The cost of living is too high. We are concerned
about the border. Yes, democracy matters. But if you can't pay your bills, it's
hard to care about something as nebulous as democracy...
Yes, there are people who believe that democracy matters.
They are called Democrats, and most Independents agree. The ninth question of a
Washington Post-University of Maryland poll conducted December 14-18 of 2023
asked
Which comes closer to your point of view: the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 was an attack on democracy that should never be forgotten, or too much is being made of the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 and it is time to move on?
The choices were Never be forgotten, Time to move on," and No opinion/skipped.
Fivety-five percent of repsondents opted for "never be forgotten," forty-three percent for "time to move on," and two percent were the remainder.
Then there are Republicans. Do the math, as Griffin and Haines did not. It is certain that a majority of Republicans, likely an overwhelming majority, went for "time to move on." And that does not include the Republicans (and a few Independents) who would have been reluctant to suggest to pollsters- whom many don't trust- that they oppose democracy.
Certainly, people did care about the border and the cost of living. However, not only is there relatively little a President can do about prices, the economy generally was better in the past election system than it was four years earlier, when Donald Trump was President, and better than it was when Ronald Reagan won easy re-election with "Morning in America." Voters did hold Democrats more than Republicans to blame for the chaotic border. However, the situation improved markedly in the last several months before the election and would have quieted further had a bill crafted on a bipartisan basispassed Congress. That was the bill to which Donald Trump responded by saying roughly "no, not on Biden's watch will we allow this to improve."
Many voters do care more about the price of eggs and gas than they do about democracy. But that's just the point. Most Republicans were fine with the attempted coup, and among the small minority which thought it was "awful," democracy (or representative democracy or democratic republic) is not a value held dear.
If that wasn't naive enough, Griffin then remarked
I aay this with due respect for Joe Biden. I didn't disagree with a word he said in that op-ed. But people are saying we have concerns about your age. He waited until August and then gave Kamala Harris this runway (shows two fingers close together) to run for President. All the warning signs ere there. They had the choice to stop Donald Trump from being inaugurated, and here we are.
I don't know whether Griffin was referring to stopping Trump's inauguration, as she literally stated, or to defeating Trump at the polls, which would at least make a little sense. Three months before the election, the AP noted
Just as soon as Biden abruptly ended his candidacy, Harris
and her team worked rapidly to secure backing from the 1,976 party delegates
needed to clinch the nomination in a formal roll call vote. She reached that
marker at warp speed, with an Associated Press survey of delegates nationwide
showing she locked down the necessary commitments a mere 32 hours after Biden’s
announcement.
Harris’ nomination became official after a five-day round of
online balloting by Democratic National Convention delegates ended Monday
night, with the party saying in a statement released just before midnight that
99% of delegates casting ballots had done so for Harris. The party had long
contemplated the early virtual roll call to ensure Biden would appear on the
ballot in every state. It said it would next formally certify the vote before
holding a celebratory roll call at the party’s convention later this month in
Chicago.
It was quick, clean, and decisive. There was little bickering and much party unity, and an enthusiastic reception for the nominee at the national convention, which was a rousing success. Kamala Harris had become the nominee with little opposition, thus not having to run the gauntlet of a primary process in which any flaws would be revealed and she would have had to answer for either her earlier positions on issues or be drawn further left. Either would have been a liability in the general election campaign, and she worked feverishly and successfully to galvanize anti-Trump Republicans.
Kamala Harris was easily made the party's nominee. She then ran the campaign as she saw fit, one which probably would maximize her chance of being elected, stressing that so many Republicans were in her corner and that she would govern not as a partisan Democrat and in a fashion far less chaotic than would her opponent.
It was not enough. It was insufficient because though running a good campaign, she was a very bad candidate. It was insufficient also because, whatever Griffin's friends wanted her to hear, the vast majority of Republicans (and some Independents) were satisfied with an attempted coup. It would be nice to think otherwise, that there is sweeping, bipartisan support for democracy but, as Griffin herself would put it, "and here we are."
Of course, Ms. Harris had nothing to do with cancellation of student debt, other than possibly encouraging Mr. Biden to do it. The Vice President is the presiding officer of the Senate and casts the deciding vote there in csse of a tie. The Vice President always will do that as desired by the President.
Nonetheless, if Kamala Harris were to replace Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket (as appears increasingly unlikely) and wished to run as representing the Biden-Harris Administration, the GOP would be more than happy to accommodate her. Republicans and conservative media- and most media less friendly to the Democratic Party than is MSNBC- would remind voters constantly, as did this piece in February, that
President Biden, facing a political crisis at the
U.S.-Mexico border in the early days of his administration, tapped Vice
President Kamala Harris to lead a high-profile response that would bet heavily
on improving conditions in three Central American countries.
It was known as the “root causes” strategy. The border,
administration officials argued, was only a symptom. If the United States could
improve economic, security and political conditions in Honduras, El Salvador
and Guatemala, fewer people would risk the perilous journey and much of the
problem could be solved, they reasoned.
Three years later, the border crisis has only deepened, with
record numbers of migrants from all over the hemisphere overwhelming the
border, and a president on the defense as Republicans make immigration a key
issue in his reelection campaign.
Specialists in migration say the administration
miscalculated, choosing a narrow and time-consuming strategy that failed to
anticipate the shifting nature of migration.
“It was focused on a long-term scenario and it was focused
on countries that are no longer the primary sending countries,” said Ariel Ruiz
Soto, a senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, a
nonpartisan research group.
Today the record number of migrants at the border has been fueled by people fleeing Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti, who together accounted for 583,000 border arrests in the 2023 budget year.
The Biden Administration's record on the border is dismal and the visuals would be epic. On OANN, Newsmax, and on local stations throughout the country (video below), viewers would be subject to video of individuals streaming across our southern border. And they typically would not be men, women, and children but rather men, unaccompanied by women, thus intensifying the fear fear the videos are to engender.
A valid representation of the problem of illegal immigration? No. A problem for which Vice President Harris is responsible? No. Effective? You bet.
If she were to replace Joe Biden, Kamala Harris surely would claim credit for the many accomplishments of the present Administration. However, that door swings both ways- and with the current cranky mood of the American public, the door would likely hit her where she wouldn't like it.
She is excellent. Why does a name make any difference??
— Jen "I dissent " Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) July 8, 2024
This Parkinson's controversy appears to be a tempest in a teapot or for those born after circa 1960, a lot of nothing. Emily Baumgaertner and Peter Baker of The New York Times note that Dr. Kevin Cannard
a neurologist who specializes in movement disorders and
recently published a paper on Parkinson’s. The logs, released by the White
House, document visits from July 2023 through March of this year. More recent
visits, if there have been any, would not be released until later under the
White House’s voluntary disclosure policy.
It was unclear whether Dr. Cannard was at the White House to
consult specifically about the president or was there for unrelated meetings.
Dr. Cannard’s LinkedIn page describes him as “supporting the White House
Medical Unit” for more than 12 years. His biography on Doximity, a website for
health professionals, lists him as a “neurology consultant to the White House
Medical Unit and the physician to the president” from 2012 to 2022, which would
include the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump.
Records from the Obama administration, when Mr. Biden was
vice president, show that Dr. Cannard made at least 10 visits in 2012 plus a
family tour; four in 2013; one in 2014; four in 2015; and eight in 2016. Mr.
Trump rescinded Mr. Obama’s voluntary White House visitors disclosure policy,
so records are not available for his four years in office.
In all the Parkinson's hoopla, no one from the media seems curious about no records being available for the Trump White House since the time that then-President Trump decided to shut the media out of information. Aside from the Times article, there is little attention paid to the statement of White House spokesperson Andrew Bates that in his annual physical, President Biden "has been seen by a neurologist once a year" and that "examination has found no sign of Parkinson's and he is not being treated for it."
That's not to suggest all is well with President Biden's health. However, less well is the individual representing the President to the press, hence to the voting public:
Later in the briefing, Karine Jean-Pierre says she "takes offense to what Ed alluded to," when she dodges on the Parkinson's specialist, adding that it is "really unfair" that she is "holding information" from the White House press corps. pic.twitter.com/YACDBlIblM
If the press secretary is to serve the President effectively, she should not get into such an extended argument with a reporter. Nor should she say "for security reasons, we cannot share names" when
At her regular briefing later in the day, Karine
Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, refused to answer questions about
Dr. Cannard’s visits, saying she would not discuss specialists who come to the
White House out of concern for their “privacy” and “security,” even though Dr.
Cannard lists his affiliation with the White House on a public website.
Ed O'Keefe, the CBS News correspondent Jean-Pierre quarreled with, had earlier in the exchange identified Dr. Cannard by name. And yet, the press secretary claimed "for security reasons, we cannot share names".... a name which already had been "shared" on a public website.
This is not simply a matter of transparency. The name was out there. The problem is with a press secretary who has been simply awful from the beginning of her tenure. Admittedly, on a list of the President's problems, this is probably only #41 or so. Similar to Biden's cognitive issue, it is one more matter which the White House has ignored. Jean=Pierre has improved somewhat, yet her presence remains one more obstacle to Joe Biden's re-election, one which should long ago have been removed.
Credit to black-oriented Philadelphia radio station HURD.
After an interview (the second by a black-oriented station) with President Biden recorded July 3 was aired on July 4, CNN's Victor Blackwell asked Andrea Lawful-Sanders
about your interviews, and something – I listened to both of
them. And there’s something that’s similar here. You each were, you asked for
questions, and maybe that’s what you were allowed to ask by, the campaign or
the White House. But they were essentially the same questions, both interviews
about accomplishments, progress in your respective state, what’s at stake in
the election, what do you has to say about this debate performance, and what he
would say to voters who think their vote doesn’t matter or might sit this
election out. Were those questions given to you by the White House, or did you
have or the campaign, or did you have to submit questions ahead of this
interview?
The friendly chat with the President turned out to be a bad political move because
Lawful-Sanders arranged the interview, including the
prewritten questions, without the knowledge of WURD management, which “violates
our practice of remaining an independent media outlet accountable to our
listeners,” wrote Sara M. Lomax, the president and CEO of WURD Radio.
Lawful-Sanders’ separation from the station is effective immediately.
“This is something we take very seriously,” Lomax added in
the statement. “Agreeing to a predetermined set of questions jeopardizes that
trust and is not a practice that WURD Radio engages in or endorses as a matter
of practice or official policy.”
The exchange with Lawful-Sanders was not a good
political move also by the President, who stated
By the way I’m proud to be, as I said the first vice
president, the first Black woman served with a Black president, proud of the
first Black woman, the Supreme Court. There’s just so much that we can do
because together we, there’s nothing. Look, this is the United States of America.
Identifying himself as a black woman was apiece with Biden's theme during the
interview as
Biden likely jumbled the sentence because he'd earlier
spoken about being the first vice president to serve under a Black president.
Earlier in the interview, he also spoke about how he was the
first president to have a Black woman as vice president and had appointed
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme
Court.
This is governance by quota.
The President had ruled out males, as well as whites, Latinas,
Asian-American, or members of American Indian tribes. But, O.K.: results
matter, and Mrs. Jackson was an excellent choice.
However, there should be no more pride in serving under a
black President than under a white President, especially because Biden would
not have been selected if he had not been white.
That's all in the past, of course. But Kamala Harris was
tapped by former Vice President Biden because she is a black woman, one about
whom Jill Biden, following a presidential debate in June of 2019, maintained
I think that they were looking at the past. I mean, the one
thing you cannot say about Joe is that he’s a racist. I mean, he got into
politics because of his commitment to civil rights. And then to be elected with
Barack Obama, and then someone is saying, you know, you’re a racist?
According to New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and
Alex Burns in their book published in May, 2022, Dr. Biden complained
"There are millions of people in the United States. Why... do we have to
choose the one who attacked Joe?"
That was a question she should have (and probably did)
addressed to her husband. A bad Attorney
General, unremarkable United States Senator, and terrible candidate, Harris
nonetheless was selected as a running mate by a 77-year-old white male because,
well, he was a 77-year-old white male.
He is now an 81-year-old male in serious decline and facing irresistible pressure to leave the race. There is little indication that
the Democratic Party has chosen to be democratic and open the process to
candidates other than the sitting Vice President because.... (See above.)
If President Biden had heeded the advice of Bill Maher andJames Carville late last year, he would have chosen to sit this one out. There
would have been a season of primaries and campaigning and a good chance that a
strong Democratic nominee would have emerged. However, f the very unpopular Joe
Biden drops his re-election bid, the very unpopular Kamala Harris now is the
most likely nominee, an occurrence which would be applauded as
"historic" by a Party which considers that a higher priority than
defeating Donald J. Trump.
As of 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, there are three camps in the Democratic Party. There are those who will soon disappear, doggedly defending President Biden; individuals, such as Jim Clyburn, who believe that the presidential nomination should be handed on a silver platter to Vice President Kamala Harris; and individuals who believe there should be open competition for the top spot once Joe Biden bows out.
In the latter category are who could be characterized as democratic Democrats. Most clearly representative of this group is longtime U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas. He has it exactly right:
Doggett notes that Joe Biden has been an effective President and that "our overriding consideration must be who has the best hope of saving our democracy from an authoritarian takeover by a criminal and his gang." Having emphasized "too much is at stake to risk a Trump victory," the congressman proceeds logically to "he has the opportunity to encourage a new generation of leaders from whom a nominee can be chosen to unite our country thorough an open, democratic process."
Leave aside (for now) the race-mongering. In the midst of an occasional insight, it is just something you have to put with in Elie Mystal. More importantly, though a lawyer, he is not a campaign finance attorney nor possessing of any particular credentials in campaign finance law. And despite the highly misleading title of this article, it is not at all clear that Kamala Harris would inherit Biden campaign funds. Reportedly, the money could be refunded to donors, "who could in turn donate to a new candidate. Further, two experts in the field
noted that if Biden steps aside, the funds could be transferred to a charity or a super PAC, which would not be able to coordinate with the campaign. The funds could also be transferred to the national party.
Campaign finance law is (in)famously complex and arcane. However (or therefore) the bottom line is that no one knows for sure what would become of the funds already collected for the campaign. Practically, that means that the Party could do whatever it wishes. In the worst case scenario, it does what is later deemed illegal and is eventually fined. And no one, aside from perhaps the then-chairperson of the FEC remembers the time in 1993 that
Senator Bob Dole's 1988 campaign for President has agreed to
pay more than $120,000 in civil penalties for election law violations, the
largest settlement for any Presidential campaign organization, the Federal
Election Commission said today.
In the settlement, Dole campaign officials admitted that they had committed several serious violations in raising and spending money for the 1988 presidential primaries.
In an extensive article following Dole's death in December, 2021, The New York Times made no mention of the campaign violation.. Neither did The Washington Post. Few if any people paid attention at the time of the infraction; ditto when the fine was levied, and at the time of his passing, no one noticed, let alone cared about it.
If privilege is to reign supreme, the Party vey likely could transfer the campaign funds to Kamala Harris. Mystal may be only the first, or close to the first, of well-known individuals to imply that race must be his party's primary concern in choosing someone to replace Joe Biden, and that to overlook her would be racist. (My "leave aside for now" meant only for the moment.)
Political pundits have understood for many months that the election would turn on whether it is viewed by voters as a choice or a referendum, the latter obviously a welcome scenario for Donald Trump. If Kamala Harris is nominated for President, Mr. Trump would delight in excoriating what would become known as the Biden-Harris administration, an albatross no candidate other than Harris or Biden would have to bear.
In response, the Party should do as Lloyd Doggett suggests and recognize that keeping Donald Trump from returning to the White House is the greatest priority. The shattering of glass ceilings is far less critical, especially now that the US Supreme Court has decided in TRUMP v. United States that the President of the United States of America may assume the powers of a king.
I see trees of green, Red roses too, I see them bloom
For me and you. And I think to myself, What a wonderful world.
Even Louie Armstrong's songwriters (their lyrics above) wasn't as divorced from reality as this economist, as well as others who want Joe Biden to persevere:
The main task now is to defeat Donald Trump and the Republican Party which adores him and would view his election as confirmation of its obeisance to a candidate who has openly advocated termination of the Constitution. Thanks go to Pete Buttigieg for his service to his country serving in Iraq. However, my guess is that the American people are not yearning to vote for a short, small, gay man. And as a nominee for President, he'd have to answer for the Administration's response- or lack thereof- to the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine.
Also, a white man. The Democratic Party is not going to persuade Biden to throw in the towel and consider an alternative to the sitting Vice President in order to nominate a white male, especially if his name does not rhyme with "Calvin Gruesome." This pertains to a statement about the incumbent President- threat, really- uttered by Democratic strategist Karen Finney, reported last September and which I've quoted several times:
When you had people who were trying to test the waters, the party rose up and made it clear to those individuals —
who were mostly white men — that to disrespect the vice president would not be
well received by women and people of color within the party. They got a little bit of a smack in
the face.
President Biden now is dead man walking, thus Kamala Harris, dead woman walking. Twisting Joe Biden's arm to persuade him to exit the race no longer would be disrespecting either of them. Joe Biden is concerned about not only the country, but also about the Democratic Party and his own legacy. Continuing with this charade of a race would doom a great many Democrats down ballot and tarnish substantially and irreparably his own legacy.
So, what to do?
If you're the last ex-President of the Democratic Party, you convene a gathering of party leaders and other possibly influential parties. It should be not very long nor very short and in addition to Barack Obama, probably should include Eric Holder, former Attorney General, now head of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee; Nancy Pelosi, former House Speaker, still a congresswoman and party heavyweight; Nanette Diaz Barragan, head of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus; Representative James Clyburn, who made Joe Biden the 2020 nominee; perhaps Val Demings, formerly both a police chief and US Representative from Florida; and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, because even the Democratic Party needs a white male here and there. One or two of these may balk at being involved and could be replaced by another individual.
The group's major order of business would be to agree upon a viable alternative to Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, the latter of whom was selected by candidate Biden and who is even less popular (at least until Thursday night) than the President. It must, however, be a package deal, with both a Presidential and Vice Presidential nominee selected.
I'm partial to to the sound of "President Sherrod Brown" or "President Rafael Warnock." However, the latter may not be saleable to the American electorate and the former not saleable to the Party. (See "Finney, Karen" above.) And now is not the time to be stuck on our favorites, nor on the incumbent being the best President of our lifetime, even of those of us who are elderly
Therefore, given the overriding importance of defeating Donald Trump and of electing Democrats throughout the country, would be Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in the top spot and the young governor of Maryland, Wes Moore, in the bottom spot.
Agreement would have to be reached with those two individuals, contingent on President Biden bowing out. The latter is the easy part; if there is a consensus ticket determined and Joe Biden does not step aside, the Party has a far greater problem than it now appears to have. And I think it very unlikely that under those circumstances, Mr. Biden wouldn't discover that the needs of party and country are greater than his own.
And if he doesn't, we will learn that the Democratic nomination for President is worth about as much as John Nance Gardner reportedly believed the vice-presidency to be: "not worth a bucket of warm spit."
