Sometimes coincidences happen in American politics, but what’s happening right now with the Democratic Party — the repeated loud and public doubting about Joe Biden’s future by prominent party figures — is not a coincidence.
This is coordinated, and as the 2024 election draws nearer, anything is possible.
In an interview with Patrick Bet-David this week, Robert Kennedy Jr. said something about the eventual Democrat presidential nominee I hadn’t considered. “If he were going to drop out,” Kennedy said, referring to Biden, “the time to drop out would be during the convention because then he would control the delegates, because they’re all Biden delegates, and he would then be able to pick his successor.”
The idea being that Biden, with the full Democrat apparatus behind him, would lock up the nomination by formally “running” but then direct all of his secured delegates to fall behind someone else, either because he knows he can’t endure a general election campaign, or because he’s been told he better not try.
I can’t think of a more bloodcurdling scenario, and it’s not at all out of the realm of high possibilities. “If Trump wasn’t running,” Biden said at a fundraiser on Tuesday, “I’m not sure I’d be running.”
Democrats are, of course, in a problem of their own making. They nominated a cadaver who was twice rejected for the spot in the past. But it turned out that with a little pandemic hyping, race riot stoking, and mail-in ballot rigging, they were able to pull things off and foist him into the White House, defeating (temporarily) Donald Trump. Unfortunately, the country collapsed into ruin under Biden, and the next election was fast approaching. They knew he shouldn’t run again, but his natural successor was an inept and undeniably unqualified Kamala Harris, Biden’s black woman of color female vice president.
They were stuck with the only person who could say he had beaten Trump before and was the best option to do it again. It just so happened that that person was now past the age of 80, in obvious and rapid decline, and had overseen a presidential term marked by global war and economic catastrophe.
The only other option was to have a brutal open primary, something that the party’s power structure would never allow. And that’s why Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s scenario is a potential likelihood. But that leads to the next problem — it’s unthinkable that the party’s voters would accept that national leadership would unilaterally determine who gets to be the nominee. I don’t know if you’ve seen Democrat voters lately, but they’re not exactly moving along with the rest of the herd.
There would be rioting and, almost certainly, violence. For weeks, maybe months. What would Democrat leaders do to quell it? What wouldn’t they do? Nonetheless, it’s a price they’d be willing to pay if it increased their chances of defeating Trump a second time.
Democrats cornered themselves. But there is absolutely no way in hell they will quietly plod their way to likely defeat. It’s going to get very, very messy, and it’s destined to be dangerous.
And you thought 2020 was wild.
