None Dare Call It A Conspiracy, Because It Wasn’t

Right now, the Republican Party is a dog sitting in the middle of the road with a muffler dangling from its mouth wondering what to do next. After months — really, years — of insisting that Joe Biden was mentally incapable of being President, he stepped down from the race. And instead of throwing the Democratic Party into the hoped-for chaos, the party quickly rallied behind Kamala Harris, who now seems a lock to be the 2024 nominee.¹

As a result, the Trumpists seem a bit discombobulated. Early attacks on Harris have veered into sexism and racism: calling her a “DEI Vice President”; insisting she can’t be President because she never gave birth; implying, falsely, that she owes her entire career into a brief relationship with Willie Brown 30 years ago. They also seem to be trying to merge the “Copmala” criticisms from the Left with “soft on crime” criticisms from the Right, which is an odd and unstable mix. I suspect they will settle down into standard “all Democrat are Communists” mode eventually.

But two of the opposition criticisms of what just happened have been shared by some on the Left: that Biden was “deposed” in a “coup” and/or that the Democrats and the media were concealing his mental decline. That these narratives are a bit in tension doesn’t seem to bother anyone. But neither criticism is quite valid, I think.

First, there is the process by which Harris was chosen. The most extensive and thoughtful criticism comes from Freddie Deboer:

Some people really had opinions about my brief flash of unhappiness over the process through which Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president – a coronation which did not require her to receive a single vote from an actual, normal Democratic voter. (It remains the case that she has never received a single vote from any voters outside of California, ever, in her political career, which some might suggest represents a wee bit of risk.) I remain disgusted but not surprised by the Democratic party and its machinations, where not even the smallest fig leaf of democratic process survived Harris’s blitzkrieg approach to the nomination. (That is, having it handed to her by her friends in elite Democratic circles.) And I think Democrats are essentially rerunning 2016, where their loyalty to the Clintonite center-right political machine compelled them to nominate an incredibly flawed candidate in a race in which any generic Democratic governor or senator almost certainly would have won. The party never learns. And so we have the confluence of strategic idiocy and rank elitist control. Well: I decline to obediently get onboard the way that (for example) the entire New York Times Opinion section has.

Freddie’s criticisms are several: that Harris is a flawed candidate and an actual primary might have picked a better one; that the country may not be ready to elect a woman of color; and that the primary was a primary in name only since Biden was basically guaranteed the nomination.

All the criticisms are reasonable. I agree with all three. But I still think that the party coalescing behind Harris was the least bad of the options presented once it became clear that Biden could not both run for President and be President at the same time.

First, the idea that the Democrats could run some kind of blitz primary between now and the convention seems less a political possibility than a fantasy from The West Wing. Organizing such a thing would be a massive undertaking. And it’s not clear at all that the winner of such a rushed primary would have any kind of legitimacy as far as the Democratic base is concerned. It’s not clear that participation would be any higher in a blitz primary than it was in the actual primary.

A quick primary would also fail to address the biggest concern: that Harris may not be able to run a successful campaign down the stretch. Such a primary is not going to favor a candidate who can organize for the long haul; it will favor a candidate who can grab the spotlight for a week.

Consider the 2020 primary. While Biden started out with a lead and eventually maintained it, there were brief periods where Warren and Sanders were leading. There were brief surges by Buttigieg, Klobuchar and, God help us, Michael Bloomberg. But none of those candidates were able to maintain their momentum. All of them might have lost to Trump because none of them could consolidate their support. Now imagine doing a blitz primary at any point in that process. You probably would not have chosen Biden but some candidate who had a temporary moment in the Sun before fading badly.

And, because this is politics, it can always be worse. Check out the 2012 Republican primary. At various points, Cain, Gingrich and even Santorum led. Michelle Bachmann had a brief surge. But Romney outlasted them. The primary system has innumerable problems but one of its strengths is it values building an organization over a brief flash of enthusiasm. A quick primary destroys that strength.

Moreover, even that supposed “strength” of the primary is very limited. Freddie describes the primary system as the immune system of the parties, getting rid of bad candidates. Maybe that was true once but that immunological function has long faded. Trump won primaries three times. Clinton won the primary in 2016 and then bungled the general. The extreme partisanship of US politics means that primaries, frequently voted in only by hefty partisans, often produce candidates that can’t win the general election. Our gubernatorial election in Pennsylvania produced a Republican candidate so extreme that I knew people who left hospital beds to vote against him.

A true primary, taking place over months, might have fulfilled the function of producing the best candidate. Or it might have torn the party apart along sectional lines. But it’s academic. Once Biden stepped down, there was a critical need to settle on a candidate ASAP. And not just for party unity or whatever. The GOP has been threatening lawsuits to keep Biden on the ballot. The Democrats already had to jump through hoops to maintain access to Ohio’s ballot. Had this process drawn out even a little bit, the GOP would have been guaranteed to bring a lawsuit before a sympathetic court trying to strike the nominee from ballots in a swing state. Indeed, they are already filing lawsuits over the election with the openly stated hope of overturning the vote in a critical state or muddying the waters enough to throw the election to the House.

The one thing to come out of this mess was the realization among Democrats that it needed to be settled fast, not drawn out in a lengthy, bruising and electorally ruinous convention fight.

Is that un-small-d-democratic? Maybe. But I’ve long been dubious of primaries. And, in the end, the strength of democracy isn’t that the people get what they want; it’s that politicians are held accountable. If Harris loses, her political career will be finished.

And frankly, I do think there is a point in those who argue that Democratic voters did have a voice in this. They voted not for Biden but for his delegates. And if the candidate steps down, that frees the delegates to vote for whomever they feel best represents the interests of the party. And they have decided, very quickly, that the best course is Kamala Harris. The Democratic voters and the nation elected Harris Vice President in 2020. And while it’s been 60 years since a VP had to step into the big pants, that is part of the job description. It’s not all smiling at state dinners and hanging out with cool astronomers at the Naval Observatory.²

The Right Wing, as usual, is more disordered in their thinking but the talking point emerging from MAGA is that this was a coup staged against a failing old man. Nonsense. Joe Biden isn’t that far gone.³ He’s a grown-ass man who has been in politics longer than most voters have been alive. The smooth transition to Harris and the way prominent Democrats fell in line instantly smacks of his hand on the rudder. This is exactly the way you would expect it to have gone had he been persuaded it was time to step down. And again, this is not unprecedented. Johnson declined to run for a third term because it was clear he wouldn’t have the support of the party. In the 19th century, numerous incumbents failed to win their party’s nomination because of internal politics or administrative failure. To be blunt, this talking point seems less about what just happened to the Democrats and more of the endless unceasing attempts by MAGA to whaddabout the events of January 6. The two events are not remotely comparable.

Now it may turn out the Democrats are screwed anyway. Harris’s 2020 campaign famously ended before a vote was cast and the turnover among her staff has approached Trumpian levels of chaos. And while she’s been making the rounds and pulling in donations, this will come down to grassroots organizing and getting the vote out, two things she has not shown the chops for…yet.

In the end, I partially agree with critics: the best course would have been for Biden to have announced two years ago that he wasn’t going to run again. But coulda woulda shoulda. Of the options the Democrats faced, this was the least bad one. And also the one that most reflects what their own party wants.

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The second criticism to emerge is that the Democrat and the media knew that Biden was effectively a vegetable for the last few years. The flavors of this range from a simple cover-up to Harris having secretly been running the government for the past year or two. But while this a tempting narrative, I also find it wanting. The reason is my father’s Oldsmobile.

When I was a teenager, my first car was literally my father’s Oldsmobile. The car was … not in the best shape. It would occasionally refuse to start. It would occasionally stall in traffic. The less said about the air conditioning, the better. But it was perfectly serviceable. It got me to school and back. Occasionally, we’d have to replace a part that had mysteriously failed but it was OK. I was fine with it. I thought it would certainly last me through college.

And then one day, it completely died in the middle of the road.

It turned out that, among other problems, the car had a faulty computer chip that would occasionally short out and/or destroy components of the engine. The day it died for good, it did this to so much of the engine, the only solution was replacing it. So we sold it “as is” and got a Ford.⁴

I feel like this entire Biden “cognitive decline” narrative is a lot like the slow collapse of my Oldsmobile. Biden would occasionally appear a bit lost or garble his words. But, for the most part, he was fine. He got some legislation passed. He gave a State of the Union that went as smoothly as my Oldsmobile down the Stone Mountain Freeway. It was easy for people to write off any problems as isolated lapses or media exaggerations. And, to be fair, the GOP did have a tendency to exaggerate anything he did into some supposed sign of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s combined, often by snipping out the context of 7-second video clips.

There was also just a stark refusal to admit that the Republicans might have a point. The politics of our age is defined by Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Whatever the other party says must be wrong. If Democrats say grass is green, the Republicans will hold a press conference saying grass is blue and only Communists think it is green. A big reason the Democrats were in denial was because Republicans kept insisting that Biden was a dozen eggs short of a dozen. And, to be completely fair to the Democrats, Republicans have been known for this kind of garbage narrative. They were proclaiming that Biden was brain-dead before the 2020 election and famously said that Clinton wasn’t going to live through the 2016 election.

In 1992, Ronald Reagan gave a fantastic rousing speech at the 1992 RNC convention. The crowd chanted “four more years” and some people joked we should repeal the 22nd Amendment. What we didn’t know at the time was that he was showing the first signs of the Alzheimer’s disease that would eventually contribute to his death. Aging is not a straight line. Even people in the depths of dementia — which Biden was and is not in — can have good days.

But the debate was my car dying on the road. It was a point at which his struggles could no longer be denied, eventually not even by himself.

Look, maybe I’m giving too much grace to the party and the media, but this looks less like a coverup and more of bias, a refusal to believe what was in front of them. A refusal to admit that maybe the Republicans had a point.

Moreover, while I am willing to hear criticism on the “cover-up” front from Democrats and Independents, I’m not going to listen to it from Trump supporters. The MAGA base has been in denial about who Donald Trump is since he came down the escalator. They have waved away his admitted crimes, justified his attempted coup, laughed at his lies, blinded themselves to his awful behavior and are currently ignoring his obvious signs of cognitive decline. Over the last few months, Trump speeches have frequently featured bizarre stories, odd segues and forgotten names. His claims — such as that he created Veterans Choice — suggests either a pathological liar or dementia. And yet they claim that he’s fit as a fiddle.

Neither candidate is suited for the next four years. The difference now is that the Democrats have done something about their candidate, with his assent. The Republicans won’t because no one would dare stand up to Trump.

The gripping hand is that it may not matter come November. 45% of the country would vote for Trump even if he were running against a God-Moses ticket and 45% of the country would vote against him even if he were running against Satan-Mussolini. Trump only needs a couple more percentage points to take the Electoral College, so he has the inside track.

In that sense, I think the Democrats made the right strategic decision. There was no way Biden was going to not only close the gap with Trump but build up the popular vote lead of 3-5 points necessary to take the Electoral College. Harris might not either but at least that possibility exists.

But I also think it was the right decision morally. Biden is an 81-year-old man showing signs of mental decline. He was not suited to four more years in a job that demands unceasing attention. He may — and I hope he does — live another twenty years, happy and functional, enjoying the sunset of his long political career. But it was clear that he would not be able to keep up with the Presidency, let alone the Presidency and a tight electoral fight.

Given the options the Democrats had — a sham blitz primary or a floor fight, with Republican legal challenges to follow — they made the best of a bad situation. They should have made the best of it a year ago. But they couldn’t see the potholes ahead. And if I were a Democrat, I’d be far more concerned about their lack of foresight than about whether the process of selecting Harris was democratic enough.

1. Obama, who famously doesn’t like to put his thumb on the scale, finally endorsed her on Friday.
2. Also, historically, the Vice Presidency has almost always been the easiest stepping stone to the Presidency. Of our 49 Vice Presidents, 15 have become President and another four were major party nominees, not counting Nixon twice and not counting Harris herself. Basically, if you’re VP, there’s about a 40% chance you’ll be nominated for President at some point.
3. And if he were, maybe a palace coup is preferable.
4. The Ford, we would find out in a few months, had a bad transmission. Take that as a extended metaphor for Harris if you like.