AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
The Joe Biden candidacy is over. The June 27 debate proved to be the death knell many speculated, as the president’s soporific and absent-minded performance sparked a total panic among Democrats that never subsided. Behind-the-scenes moves were directed at Biden to pressure him to drop out, including a brutal George Clooney op-ed, which signaled the end of Hollywood cash flowing freely into the coffers of this campaign. With more Democrats, including Barack Obama, joining the chorus, money issues, and dismal polling in battleground states, Joe Biden finally waved the white flag amid recovering from a recent COVID diagnosis.
The president was defiant for days, saying that only God the Almighty could remove him from the ticket. Yet, his media interviews, which were supposed to dispel concerns about his mental health, continued to disappoint or become outright disasters, and the campaign to push him out only intensified. There was a brief period where all things halted following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, but this campaign resumed during the Republican Convention.
Only this time, the top dogs were barking, with Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries all leaking damning meetings, where they told the president he was losing and his position was so poor that he was placing Democrats writ large in a situation where they’d be totally wiped out in November. Only when this trio felt Biden wasn’t taking them seriously did they leak these details to the press.
Biden appears to be stepping back from his ‘I’m not going’ position when he told BET that he’d step aside if a medical condition arose. This snippet dropped as he tested positive for COVID during a Nevada trip that got cut short. The other leg to collapse from under Biden is the base: two-thirds want him to drop out.
It was a lengthy siege by Democrats, but they saw the polling. Some privately were drafting new strategies for November. Resigned to a Trump victory for the presidency, some Democrats are looking to campaign as a check against a new MAGA era in American politics. CNN’s John King had a damning analysis of the race during the Republican Convention, where he said if things stand as they are now, 16 weeks before Election Day, Trump stands to clinch 330 electoral votes. A blowout awaited Democrats—it was time for a change. Yet, any Democrat polled against Trump also gets beaten handily by the former president. After Trump’s assassination attempt, the main attack line Biden had was that the former president was a threat to democracy. That got neutralized. It was then all about record, and no one likes what they see from Biden, who sits on a 32 percent approval rating.
The Democratic Party is coming undone at the most crucial point of the campaign season. It looks lost, adrift, and visionless, more concerned about pronouns, Hamas terrorists, and other niche progressive issues whose resonance doesn’t go past the faculty lounge at Yale.
The Democratic Party has entered territory unseen since the 1960s regarding an open convention and fractures in the base. Before this announcement, there were reports about how the Democratic National Committee would handle this situation. CNN’s Jamie Gangel noted that the DNC might hold a speed-dating-like primary open to anyone, peppered with a couple of debates, with the final decision rendered at the convention in August.
Yet, there was also significant consternation among those in Kamala Harris’ orbit about being leap-frogged when she’s the sitting vice president, the only person who could legally receive Biden’s war chest. The only issue is that Harris doesn’t do much better against Trump, and she’ll likely suffer declining poll ratings the longer she stays in the spotlight, exposing how she is unqualified for the job. Her approval ratings are also atrocious. The irony in all of this is that Joe didn’t even want Harris as his vice president. Some, like Nate Silver, posit that if Biden were allowed to pick his running mate without kowtowing to the woke Left, he probably would have bowed out eons ago.
The irony is that Biden has endorsed the running mate he didn't want, Kamala Harris, for president.
