On the menu today: It’s the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and a great testament to this country’s strength and resiliency is the fact that we’re not going to spend a lot of time worrying about an al-Qaeda terrorist attack today. The world will always have problems, but even the most frightening problems are surmountable with time and effort.
Closer to home, a new survey from CBS News finds that 48 percent of Democrats feel like they’ve heard “not much” or “nothing at all” about what Kamala Harris has done as vice president, and 48 percent of independents say her work in that role has made them think worse of the Biden administration. If our octogenarian president had a popular vice president, the entire U.S. political landscape would look different. Instead, as Joe Klein observes, there is no political “transition” possible in these circumstances; Joe Biden can’t pass the torch to a vice president seen as a sure loser in 2024. But the past two years have also seen the popularity of the Bernie Sanders socialist wing of the party decline. If Joe Biden was supposed to be a transitionary figure, over the past two years, the Democrats have altered the deal. In 2024, the Democrats will have, “the same guy with the same team around him, but older.”
The Transition That Wasn’t
Joe Klein, writing at his Substack:
Biden has done what he said he would. He’s been a solid “transitional” President, but transition requires transit, a second act. We need to transition to something, a new Democratic vision of America — or to someone who can plausibly promise a creative way out of this molasses stasis. But Democrats are paralyzed. They’re terrified that a real conversation, a real political contest, will result in chaos — that Biden will collapse under pressure and there won’t be anyone credible to replace him. That is certainly a possibility; history has not been kind to incumbent presidents who faced primary challenges.
But it’s the wrong concern. Democrats really should be terrified by the opposite: that nothing will change between now and election, except Joe Biden will get older.
In some circles, Joe Biden running for a second term was never part of the plan. Back in 2019, Biden himself reportedly signaled to aides that he would serve only a single term. He was supposed to slay the dragon of Trump, get the country back to something resembling normalcy, and allow some younger, more energetic, and likely more progressive option to succeed him as president.
But if the plan had been to pass the torch to Kamala Harris in 2024, that plan was abandoned somewhere along the line, partially out of the Bidens’ desire to enjoy the power and privileges of being in the White House for another four years, and partially out of the fact that Harris has a 39 percent approval rating. As the New York Times reported in February, “even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.” This weekend’s CBS News poll found that 48 percent of Democrats feel like they’ve heard “not much/nothing at all” about what Harris has done as vice president. That figure rises to 60 percent among independents. Just 9 percent of independents said that Harris’s work as vice president made them think better of the Biden administration; 48 percent of independents said it made them think worse of the Biden team.
The current position of Biden, Harris, and almost all Democrats at this moment is:
- Of course, Kamala Harris would do an excellent job if, God forbid, Joe Biden had some health issue that required him to resign the presidency, or he couldn’t perform his duties and she became the 47th president.
- It’s absurd to even suggest that she should take over as the Democratic nominee from a man who will turn 82 shortly after the next presidential election, even if he is only doing public events from late morning to early afternoon, and increasingly unable to speak clearly, as our Luther Ray Abel detailed about the president’s most recent trip to Vietnam.
There’s a lot of friction between those positions. Either she’s ready and capable of taking over the duties at a moment’s notice, or she isn’t. If she is, she should be the nominee, or at minimum the prospects of a Harris presidency should be a big part of the 2024 presidential-race debate, since she’s likely to need to take over sometime in the next four years. And if Biden or other Democrats don’t believe Harris can take over the duties of the president, this aged commander in chief should find another vice president.
Klein’s point about this presidency’s aborted transition to some other figure is a good one; it’s like watching a relay runner decide to keep the baton to himself and attempt another circuit around the track, even though he’s slowing down. Then again, Biden reportedly doesn’t see Harris as “somebody who takes anything off of his plate.” Biden may well see himself as a man who has completed his portion of the relay, but whose teammate isn’t in position because she’s still figuring out how to tie her sneakers.
A big part of the problem for the Democrats is that they already had an opportunity to fall in love with or in line behind Harris and they rejected her. Nor is there much evidence that Democrats unfairly overlooked her or judged her too harshly. The verdict from one senior Harris campaign official, shortly before she withdrew from the 2020 race, was, “No discipline. No plan. No strategy.” Some of the most damning criticisms of Harris come from her own staffers, who paint her as indecisive and quick to scapegoat them when she makes mistakes or performs poorly. The dynamic of the 2020 campaign continued in the vice presidency, even though we’ve gotten “Kamala Harris has finally turned a corner” profile pieces from big mainstream-media institutions every few months.
But it’s hard to believe the Biden presidency would be in a dramatically different state if he had just picked a different 2020 primary rival. Harris was in the top tier and fell out of it; most of those other younger Democratic presidential candidates never rose high enough to have any significant fall.
An under-discussed aspect of the 2020 Democratic primary is that the party’s voters had a slew of options, most of whom were running under a much more explicitly progressive banner than Biden, and Democrats — not independents, not Republicans — deemed them unworthy of serious consideration. Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, Bill DeBlasio, Jay Inslee, John Hickenlooper, Eric Swalwell — they all failed to catch fire and quit before anybody cast a single vote in 2020. The likes of Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren hung on a little longer, but ended the race as afterthoughts.
The last two guys standing were the two oldest, and likely best-known and widely recognized, figures in the Democratic Party: Biden and Bernie Sanders. In other words, Democratic primary voters were given an overflowing buffet table of potential candidates, many fairly young and progressive. And no matter how many new, youthful, fresh-faced alternatives were offered, most Democratic primary voters kept choosing the two old guys.
Progressives can console themselves that Sanders has been a truly competitive second-place finisher for two cycles in a row, and perhaps a figure such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will prove similarly competitive in some future cycle. But The New Republic notices that the ascent of the American socialist movement has stopped and that the “Socialist moment” may have come and gone:
Yet the socialist story in the United States, as is true of most movements, is no longer one of relentless ascent. A few years after the onset of the pandemic—with an elevated crime rate in many cities; lingering inflation; the dissipation of anti-Trump zeal, even with the man himself running again—DSA has actually shed backers. Kicking off in 2020, a recruitment drive aimed at boosting membership to 100,000 never reached its goal, and that target is no longer touted so publicly. More broadly, socialist and socialist-friendly politicians have faced roadblocks on the local and federal levels, running into resistance from entrenched Democratic institutions, donors, and, yes, voters. Perhaps most important: Sanders was never elected president, and the larger left is bereft of any prominent or scandal-free standard-bearer as Biden seeks to again claim the Democratic nomination. . . .
Crucially, working-class Democrats and independents remain, on cultural and public safety questions, more moderate than many leftists would like. Black Democrats in Philadelphia chose as their next mayor a woman who wants to reinstate a version of stop-and-frisk and hire more police. Some Latino voters with family history in countries like Cuba and Venezuela continue to be wary of any socialist. In New York, Eric Adams, a corporate-friendly Democrat popular in the African American and Afro Caribbean neighborhoods of the outer boroughs, has made resentment of socialism a cornerstone of his mayoralty. “You water the tree of freedom with your blood,” he said in a Memorial Day speech. “We sit under the shade of that tree of freedom protected from the hot rays of socialism and communism and destruction that’s playing out across the globe.”
The magazine notes that in March 2022, AOC posted a video, discussing how she responds when she’s accused of being a socialist. In it, the congresswoman whispered, “I’m going to let you in on a secret: most people don’t know what capitalism is. Most people don’t even know what socialism is. . . . The label doesn’t matter.” That’s a different tune compared to back in 2018, when she said she embraced the “Democratic Socialist” label and said, “It’s part of what I am.” Even back in 2021, the Democratic Socialists of America called her the country’s “foremost socialist superstar.”
The fact that Biden and Sanders were the last two competitors left standing was also reflection of the fact that if you want to be a successful presidential candidate, you need to be an extremely well-known figure before you start running. Fairly or not, the electorates of both parties don’t seem to have much interest in rolling the dice on some new, unfamiliar face. That seems like an important lesson not heeded by most of the lesser-known Republican presidential candidates this cycle — presuming, of course, that they actually want to win the nomination, and not just build up their name recognition and buzz for some future endeavor.
ADDENDUM: The road to Super Bowl begins tonight . . . and of course, with that bold and confident statement, watch the Buffalo Bills go on to win it all.