Democrats and their media allies have been effulgent in their praise for President Biden after the sudden announcement of his decision not to seek another term.
Their fulsome tributes – “true patriot”, “man of honour”, “putting his country first” – might be more convincing if most of these same people had not spent the last week or two scheming, conniving and bullying to get the incumbent president to step aside in the face of wilting polling numbers against Donald Trump. Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, Barack Obama, the former president, and Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, were all as quick to praise the ageing Biden on Sunday as they had been busily preparing to bury him on Saturday.
Senator John Fetterman, of Pennsylvania, one of the few staunch Biden allies and a man who is rapidly emerging as one of the most independent thinkers in US politics, put it best: “Spare me the soaring accolades from people with their fingerprints on the blades in our president’s back,” he told Salena Zito, a reporter and fellow Pennsylvanian.
Pretending Biden’s farewell was an act of self-abnegation is almost as big a lie as the claim people in politics and the media made for the past six months that he was completely up to the job for another four years. Most of the media have been eager participants in the fraud. As late as a month ago they were dutifully relaying the White House message that there was nothing wrong with Biden. When The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy piece in June with shocking details about his frailties, other media outlets rushed to denounce it.
If Biden had announced he was going earlier this year, the claim that it was an act of selflessness might have had some merit. Coming, as it did, after poor polling numbers following his debate performance last month it looks like a well-orchestrated putsch of breathtaking cynicism.
Following that debate the high priests of the Democratic Party mobilised to oust him. Big donors stopped donating. Congressional supporters stopped supporting. Media shills stopped shilling. The message was driven hard into the White House – withdraw now or face a massive loss of support that will fatally weaken you.
Far from presenting the kind of glorious testament to democracy so many in the media are claiming this to be, this will be remembered as a dark moment for the Democratic Party and American democracy itself. Does anyone truly believe that Biden became unfit for a second term only in the past few weeks? The whole party (with a few honourable exceptions) has spent the last year trying to pull a fraud on the American electorate. Only when they were found out were they forced to own up to the hard truth that their candidate was in no condition to run again and serve again – and then, in another cynical act that mocks the democratic idea, move to oust the man who won his party’s primary contest with 80 per cent of the vote.
Now, to complete this shameful deception and chicanery, the party is going to try, probably successfully, to short-circuit any semblance of a democratic process and hand the presidential nomination to Kamala Harris, a woman who has never won a single primary or presidential vote in her life. Instead of offering the delegates who voted in this year’s primaries a chance to choose another candidate, they are aiming to foist on them the vice-president whose very inadequacies have been cited by Biden’s aides as reason for him not to step aside in her favour.
Again, the democratically orthodox thing to do here would be for Biden to resign the presidency immediately. If he is too frail to run again (and even to make an appearance in public to announce his decision) how can he be robust enough to serve another six months in office? Instead, the Democrats are planning to pull off another double deception: that Biden is fully fit to be president – but only for a few more months – and that Harris is fully fit to be president – just not quite yet.
The speed at which the Democratic establishment has rallied behind Harris suggests that they think her selection dramatically improves their chances against Trump.
They could be right: at a stroke, she transfers the age problem from the Democrats to the Republicans and at the same time offers voters a chance to break free from the endless Biden-Trump doom cycle of the past six years.
But what are her electoral credentials? When she ran for the 2020 Democratic nomination her campaign was so poor that she withdrew from the contest even before the first primary votes were cast. This record of uncertain electoral appeal goes back further. She first came to real prominence in 2010 when she ran for California attorney-general. In a state that is as Democratic as any in the country she only just made it against her Republican opponent, while other Democrats on the same ballot were chalking up landslides.
Her lack of electoral success might be down to more than the curious incoherent babble, or “word salads”, for which she has become famous. She hails from the radical progressive culture of San Francisco – left-wing even by California standards.
As for her personal story, Harris is no tribune of the struggling masses, as she likes to portray herself. She is the product of the modern elite. Her parents were university professors and throughout her career she has been helped up the ladder of preferment by powerful friends and mentors. Having risen like that she deploys her status as a woman and an ethnic minority to portray herself, ludicrously, as a victim of structural racism and sexism. Which makes her, in fact, the perfect Democratic candidate.
The Times
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