Joseph Robinette Biden Junior, known to most people as Joe, is not going to be remembered well by the history books, but he could have been. He made two fatal mistakes. He appointed the Republican Merrick Garland to the office of Attorney General, for no other reason than to troll Mitch McConnell. He also had no business running for a second term.
Here was my take in July 2024, just after that July 5th interview.
ABC Interview with Biden, from Youtube
Pay attention to the part starting at around 21:40. That's a slap in the face. Fuck your feelings, Mr. President. Wrong message. That's like him saying, "I tried, so I'll sleep well at night. Meantime, learn to sieg heil for the Bad Orange Man."
The right message for Biden would've been: "That's a terrible question, because failure is not an option. We're gonna fight like hell, give no quarter, and kick the ever-loving fuck out of fascists this November."
A week ago, even yesterday, I was like: I'm not convinced that Biden dropping out would be a winning move; we play the hand we've been dealt and get behind him. The window for finding a better candidate is closed. We're at the ass-end of the election cycle.
Today? I don't know, I'm confused, and I think we're going to be sold out by the gerontocracy once more. These old folks who have absolutely no skin in the game have absolutely no business holding power.
Old powerful people are literally ruining the world. Whether it's Netanyahu in Palestine, Putin in the Ukraine, or Biden saying that he'll be totally cool with the US going full fash as long as he gave it a good run, things are fucked. And if it does go to hell, the US and USSR won't be around to save the world like they did last time around.
Democratic donors fret over path forward after Biden’s debate performance | CNN Politics
Guess y'all should have thought about that when you anointed Biden as the nominee without a primary, even though some of us were saying that what we didn't need was an 82-year-old running for the presidency.
By the time the big donors and political insiders had encouraged him to drop out, it was probably too late for a Democratic victory in the USA. As I said in my take on the ABC interview: "The window for finding a better candidate is closed."
Biden dropped out at the behest of sundry string-pullers, and Harris became the new anointed nominee. I don't think there was much choice here. July of 2024 would have been way too late in the game for a Democratic presidential primary. And even if they did do a last-minute primary, the DNC would have found a way to guarantee that its favored candidate won. It doesn't matter; primary season was over.
According to Wikipedia:
Harris is the first nominee who did not participate in the primaries since Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968. She also had shortest general-election presidential campaign in history, at 107 days.
She had 107 days to run a campaign for the general election. Wikipedia tells us that it was the shortest general election campaign in US history.
The history bit about Vice President Hubert Humphrey, another Democrat who lost after not participating in primaries, is why I said that the window for choosing a candidate had closed.
Personally, I liked Harris and Walz. And there was so much positive energy around them during the Democratic Convention.
But eventually, their campaign devolved into celebrity endorsements and chumming around with the deeply unpopular Cheneys. She missed out on an opportunity to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience. Regardless of what you think of Ivermectin Joe -- and you know what I think of him by the nickname I just gave him -- he does have an enormous audience. I have every reason to believe that she would have gotten a multi-hour interview and been well-treated by him. If nothing else, it was a test. If you can't stand up to a few hours of softballs from Ivermectin Joe, how are you going to perform across the negotiating table from Vlad "The Defenestrator" Putin? [1]
There were a lot of headlines around the time of the presidential election about how common the web search "did Biden drop out" was. That's used as an excuse to mock Americans for being stupid. But my take is more nuanced, and hopefully more compassionate and empathetic.
If nothing else, the man had name recognition. Which is more important than we think it is. Not everyone is a political junky. Some of us are out here just trying to survive. One thing people will probably eventually learn about other people is just how many of us run on what are basically heuristics. Name recognition is one such heuristic. How many people didn't vote because their name recognition heuristic failed them on election day? What if Biden had stayed the course? Might he have won?
That bit about web searches for "did Biden drop out" on election day reminds me of something very important. The Democrats, being an elite party, also need to quit it with the mocking of a wide swath of the American people. This includes me. I've done it and so have most lefties, progressives, liberals, and even moderates.
The name of the Democratic Party comes from the Greek word demos δῆμος, which means "the people." Or apparently more accurately, the people of a land, the common people, citizens. I don't speak or write Greek, so I'll cite from a copy of Strong's Greek concordance that I found online.
Strong's Greek: 1218. δῆμος (démos) -- People, populace, public
Definition: People, populace, public
Meaning: properly: the people, especially citizens of a Greek city in popular
assembly, but in NT, multitude, rabble.
I cannot, with a straight face, call the Democrats the party of the people, even though I'm registered as one.
[1] You've heard of Vlad the Impaler, A.K.A., Vlad Tepes? I think Vlad the Defenestrator fits Vladimir Putin like a glove, considering the propensity of his enemies to fall out of windows.