Thank you, Joe. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
There is something impressively Stalinist about the way the Democratic Party is erasing the Biden presidency. Faced with the classic dilemma all vice-presidents confront when seeking to succeed their boss – are they for continuity or change? – Kamala Harris and her team have evidently calculated that continuity is a losing proposition. She won’t win defending the record of the past four years, so she is going to run against it.
As I write, delegates to the party’s convention in Chicago are preparing to give a tearful send-off to the President as he makes his reluctant valediction on Monday night. Exactly one month ago these same delegates were primed to wave their Biden-Harris signs, chant “Four more years” and spend four days extolling the 46th President’s many successes.
Now, but for the brief twilight moment he has been allotted on the first night, they come to bury Biden, not to praise him – though the Caesar analogy isn’t quite right.
As a Democrat source put it to me recently, the ruthless dispatch of the former president was less Brutus and Cassius and more Jack Kevorkian – not a hail of knives in the back but a soft word in the ear, a gentle squeeze on the syringe, and farewell, my lovely.
Having been an active participant in the assisted suicide of his presidency, the party has decided that if it is going to have any chance of winning it is going to have to euthanise Biden’s record and legacy, too.
This has always been the challenge for a party seeking a new term under a different leader, the main reason only one sitting vice-president has won election to the presidency in nearly 200 years. It’s fiendishly hard to pull off the awkward balancing act of offering something new while defending the old.
Richard Nixon in 1960 couldn’t persuade voters that he was the change the country wanted after eight years of a Republican presidency. Despite his efforts to break free, Hubert Humphrey in 1968 was irreversibly tied to Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War miseries.
Even in relatively contented times, Al Gore in 2000 was caught between trying to defend the record of the Bill Clinton presidency and subtly offering a morally superior, more uxorious alternative to the libido on legs in the White House.
Only George HW Bush in 1988 managed it. That was in part because the nation was in an unusually satisfied mood and in part because he was blessed with an opponent of such robotic charmlessness that, when famously asked about the hypothetical rape and murder of his wife, he offered up a sociological meditation on the root causes of crime.
Harris’s advisers seem to have calculated that the way to deal with this Gordian knot is to cut right through it; 2024 isn’t 1988. The Biden administration’s record is historically unpopular; its approval ratings on the crucial issues of the economy, immigration and national security are well underwater. So why not run against it?
Her first policy-focused campaign commercial highlighted the crisis at the southern border under the administration she has been a part of. “Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris,” the voice-over says. “As president she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.”
Then came last week’s economy push. Coverage of the policy rollout – even from friendly outlets – concentrated on the economic illiteracy of her proposals to stop corporate “price gouging” and solve a housing shortage.
But much more notable was the premise – that the US economy is broken. “Costs are still too high. And on a deeper level, no matter how much they work, it feels so hard to just be able to get ahead,” she told a North Carolina audience. “Now is the time to chart a new way forward.”
How long before Harris denounces the disastrous US withdrawal from Afghanistan, endless vacillation in the Middle East and insufficient (or maybe, depending on the polls) too much support for Ukraine?
The Democrats think they can get away with this unusual campaign of friendly fire for one main reason: Donald Trump.
Not only do they think they can make the campaign about him rather than their own record; they also know that, so keen are they on defeating the Republican, the party will offer Harris no internal resistance to her apostasy. She could come out like Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 and denounce her predecessor for everything he has ever done and the members would nod along enthusiastically.
Republicans are confident this won’t work, that they will be able to pin the administration’s numerous failures on her. I’m not so sure.
This is where Harris’s own record of sheer emptiness helps her. She has left such a light footprint in the Biden administration that she can plausibly claim to have had nothing to do with it. For her the critical question may be not whether she can beat Donald Trump but whether she can beat Joe Biden.
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