“Democrats are lucky to have Joe Biden,” David Brooks says about the 2024 election, and he’s right — only not for the reasons Brooks states. Brooks cites the improving economy and international relations as reasons for Democrat optimism about Biden, despite the fact that voters haven’t changed their opinion on Biden for almost two years. The most laughable reason Brooks gives us his assertion that Joe Biden isn’t a member of the “coastal elite.” After 50 years in Washington DC? Come on, man.
In this PBS Newshour discussion linked by RealClearPolitics, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus gets a lot closer to the real reason Democrats need Biden in 2024. If Biden retired, Democrats would have to either nominate Kamala Harris, or reap the harvest of their identity-politics pandering from 2020. This comes at about the 5:40 mark, after PBS host Geoff Bennett plays a clip of House Democrat Dean Phillips calling for Biden to withdraw:
There are problems with Joe Biden’s candidacy. There are many Democrats behind the scenes and a few publicly who talk about his age, who talk about other problems with his candidacy. But let’s be serious. I’m old enough to remember — I’m sorry to say, I’m old enough to remember 1980 and what happened in the Democratic Party when it was riven by division.
And if somebody were to emerge and challenge Joe Biden at this stage in the campaign, him having decided to run, his vice president, who, if he didn’t — if he somehow chose not to run, if she were not the nominee, that would create some divisions within the demographics of the party.
That’s like saying the 1968 Democrat convention had some arguments. This goes far beyond the division of 1980, when Ted Kennedy challenged incumbent president Jimmy Carter for the presidency and split the party. That was a policy dispute on the margins, but in essence a desperate bid to keep from losing a landslide by leveraging the Kennedy/Camelot mystique.
The choice of Kamala Harris was Joe Biden’s bid to paper over anger among Democrats over nominating another old white man in a cycle where their activists wanted a “diversity” ticket. Harris was supposed to carry that effort herself, but proved so inept and incompetent that Tulsi Gabbard demolished her in the early debates. Harris couldn’t even make it to Thanksgiving, let alone an actual primary contest, and yet Biden picked her anyway expressly as the future of the party.
In the three years since, Harris has proven even worse at politics. She manages to make Biden look coherent, no easy feat. As the party’s presidential nominee, Harris would prove utterly disastrous, and at least some Democrats know this.
But if Biden retires and the party doesn’t nominate Harris, all of the bad blood over the diversity promises of 2020 will explode. That will be especially true if the party nominates Gavin Newsom instead, who notably angered the black and female activists in the party by appointing Alex Padilla to fill out the rest of Harris’ term in the Senate rather than another black woman. This won’t be a Kennedy-Carter contest but an explosion of identity-politics grudges and fury, much more 1968 than 1980.
The only way to avoid that is to keep Biden on the ticket, and then win or lose, force Harris to compete for a truly open nomination cycle in 2028. That is why Democrats will prop up Biden for as long as it takes, even if they have to do a Weekend At Bernie’s campaign in 2024. Marcus is spot on, even if she’s too polite to call out the identity-politics dead end more explicitly.
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