Democrats are stuck with Biden

The New York Times and the Washington Post sent up flares last weekend: one way or another, they said, Joe Biden is on borrowed time. The last man standing who ended up the answer to Anyone But Trump turned out so inadequate for the job that Deep State media gave him a vote of no confidence and said he should go.

The Times wrote a scathing summary of What Everyone Knows: that Biden at 79 is a wreck. In their words, the man “is testing the boundaries of age and the presidency.” He can barely walk unassisted. He has zombie moments on stage. He is fully dependent on wife Jill to nudge him onward, redirect him, get him back on the TelePrompTer — and even then he will read anything there, including stage directions, Ron Burgundy-like.

Not a pretty picture. It is also not a new picture, given the pass on campaigning the MSM granted Biden, which helped hide all this back in 2020. That’s why the critical articles are so noteworthy: they denote a change. From here to 2024, it is okay to (finally) talk about how old and 25th Amendment-ready Biden is. The Times has already published its first follow-up.

The 25th Amendment got a bad name during the Trump years, being invoked as the handy-dandy alternative to multiple failed impeachments and prosecutions, a kind of last chance to dump a seated president when all else fails. In fact, the amendment, written after the Kennedy assassination exposed the problems of no clear line of deep succession in the Constitution in the nuclear age, provides precisely the mechanism needed in Joe Biden’s case.

Biden’s wacky gaffes have strayed over the line. His clumsy and chaotic policy killed innocents in Afghanistan and embarrassed the United States globally. His claim that “Putin cannot remain in power” in response to the Ukraine war, and that the US would absolutely defend Taiwan, threatened relations with two superpowers. Aides rushed to blurt out that nothing had changed and gently correct the president. Falling off a standing bike is a problem for Joe; falling off a nuclear policy is a problem for America. Biden either needs to resign for “personal reasons” (the timing set so it does not appear tied to the latest Hunter revelations) or face the judgment of the 25th and reality. He is medically no longer fit to carry out his role as Anyone But Trump.

There’s no need for a specific trigger, though the outstanding defeat expected for Democrats in the midterms could readily serve. Or the latest polls that show Joe’s approval rating at a Nixonian 33 percent, with 64 percent of Democratic voters saying they would prefer a new presidential candidate for the 2024 presidential campaign. Only 13 percent of American voters said the nation was on the right track — the lowest point since the depths of the financial crisis more than a decade ago. There’s no need for a reason to invoke the 25th Amendment; Joe is the reason. Biden is a good egg and a loyalist. He’ll go as quietly in 2022 as he did in 2016 when he was likely told by Barack Obama that he was going to have to sit out the election to pay off the party’s blood chit and allow Hillary to run unprimaried.

Biden leaving is the easy part. What happens next?

The obvious follow-on is not much better than Biden staying in the White House until 2024 (nobody expects him to run then under any circumstances.) If Biden resigns or is removed from office, Kamala Harris automatically takes over. Her poll ratings are as dismal as Joe’s, and after 18 months in office, she has nothing, literally nothing, to show for it. Despite being a black woman, Harris brings little to the table. She couldn’t even beat Biden in the Democratic primaries and the identity politics that propelled her into the Naval Observatory have lost some of their luster. She is far too quiet on what could be her signature issue, abortion rights, tagging along with the slow motion efforts to look busy out of the White House.

The tricky thing about Joe leaving power is thus what to do with Kamala. She hasn’t done much to make herself a strong candidate going forward, and she hasn’t made enough mistakes to justify nudging her aside. It’s a real conundrum. Her approval rating is 15 points below where Biden stood at this stage in Obama’s first term and 11 below Mike Pence under Trump.

Right behind the Kamala problem is the, um, well, somebody problem. There is no likely Biden successor. Guys like Beto and Buttigieg are leftovers from the 2020 campaign. Buttigieg as transportation secretary faces a conundrum of his own. Should he appear too competent in the role, he risks being forever labeled as the technocrat he is at heart, handy with tools around the office but uninspiring for the big stuff. Stumbling as transportation secretary, he’ll lose even the points he has for basic competence and appear as a glory seeker. Guy can’t win.

Spokesmodels like Beto have no chance in a national campaign. They look good on home ground but don’t have the intellectual meat on the bone needed to campaign effectively across 50 states, especially in a primary where they really do need to answer questions on complex farm subsidies in Iowa and drooping Social Security in Wisconsin and failed solar jobs in Ohio and critical race theory in Virginia. You can only stand there for so long before someone (such as Democratic primary voters in 2020) notice there’s nothing beneath the smile.

Several of the Democratic governors-in-waiting face tough re-election contests before they even think about 2024. The bottom-feeding criteria of “Anyone But Trump” is now “Anyone a Bit Better Than Biden.”

Somewhere there are Deep State Democrats wondering how they got here, especially after winning the last election. Trump has defied them multiple times, the Dracula candidate they cannot put down and must resign themselves to facing again in 2024 without the aid of the pandemic. The bench is thin, the issues facing the country — it’s the economy again, stupid — mostly of their own fumbling design.

There are people in that room rolling their eyes and saying they have little to gain replacing Biden. They may be right.