Should He Stay Or Should He Go

Okay, gamer! Here's the scenario: You have a kindly and likable president whose administration not only has restored governing normality after four years of a criminal lunatic whose pathological need for validation is wedging open the doors for American fascists to overthrow our constitutional system of liberty and the rule of law. Above and beyond defeating that monster, this also delivered a sprawling and effective constellation of policies and laws that meaningfully improved life in America and bolstered the international liberal democratic order. But, this president is beset by questions about his cognitive health due to his advanced age, and his performance in a recent debate with his opponent in the upcoming election—who happens to be the same criminal lunatic from before—has, rightly or wrongly, caused the dam of worries and reservations to burst. Now it's July, which in any other country would be plenty of time to run an election campaign, but in American elections is basically 11:58 pm ahead of an election that occurs at midnight, and Democrats are losing their shit and increasingly calling for the president to stand down from his reelection bid. Citizens have already voted months prior for whom they want the Democratic candidate to be—and they picked the president, because they always pick the incumbent—and all that remains now is the formality of nominating the incumbent in the big party convention that's coming up in just a few weeks. It's too late to replace the president at the top of the ticket except by party fiat at the convention, and there is no consensus on whether or not he actually should be replaced, but the calls for him to step aside are too numerous and urgent to be dismissed. There is real panic among activists and the party establishment.

What do you do?

What do you do? There's no obvious good answer to this. You can't replace a presidential candidate this late in an American election; you just can't. It's electoral suicide. This has been a natural law in American politics since the mid-century, when presidential nominations started becoming more (lowercase "d") democratic. Unless American society has sufficiently transformed for this law to no longer apply, replacing Joe Biden on the top of the ticket will lead to a decisive Democratic loss in November, including in the congressional elections.

But if you keep Joe Biden on the ballot, what are the odds that this panic will blow over? Almost every "disaster" in American politics turns out to be nothing of the sort; most such "disasters" are swallowed whole by the 24-hour news cycle within just a few days. This, however, seems like it might be one of the rare exceptions, and I say that because it isn't coming out of nowhere like most of these "disasters" do. This has been brewing for a while.

Much like cognitive decline itself, all this noise about President Biden's age didn't seem that serious to me until suddenly, virtually out of nowhere, it appeared to become existentially bad. What once seemed like a mixture of isolated cynics on the left, right-wing opportunists and their international allies orchestrating smear campaigns, and misinterpretation of the president's behavior by the uninformed lay public, news media, and political class, now seems to be in the past week a near-universal panic on the left. Even MSNBC, the closest thing we have to a left-wing propaganda network, is making this their top story. And the people defending President Biden seem like the exceptions.

The reason Biden's mental fitness didn't seem that serious to me is because I hadn't seen, and still haven't seen, any clear evidence that he is suffering from dementia. And I have had enough experiencing interacting with dementia sufferers to recognize it fairly well. One of the things I hate about American politics is that the core facts of a story always seem to be regarded as irrelevant by everyone. No one cares if President Biden is actually mentally fit or not—which someone like me would say is a critical detail that would significantly impact what I think our strategy should be going forward. For for almost everyone else, it's all about appearances. The media and the political class are absolutely convinced that Biden is senile, and so is a meaningful percentage of the American public.

Having a competent president obviously matters. Trump's incompetence for the job was a major plank (and validly so) of the case against him. If Biden is actually mentally deteriorating in a serious and significant way beyond the natural and manageable slowing that comes with aging, that's not trivial. That's very serious. And any strategy of "Circle the wagons and pretend that up is down!" is derelict in its responsibility to consider that.

But one might also say, equally validly, that a vote for president is really a vote for a presidential administration, and the Biden Administration has been exemplary: effective both executively and legislatively, cooperative and reliable in international politics, low in scandal, and genuinely aligned toward the interests of Americans who actually need the attention. President Biden forgave my student loans, gave me aid during the pandemic, and passed legislation to improve transit systems and roads that I use, just to name a few things that personally benefitted me directly. President Obama didn't do that. President Clinton didn't do that. And the thing is, it wasn't actually President Biden himself: It was Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and his department are the ones who forgave my student loans, for example, merely at the instruction of President Biden. A vote for a president is a vote for the kind of people that that president would surround himself with. And I have no doubt, none at all, that a second Biden Administration would be nearly if not completely as competent and effective as the first one. And if President Biden should become senile, or otherwise unwell, he would be relieved under the 25th Amendment, or would stand aside voluntarily after a private threat of the same, and would be ably and competently succeeded by Vice President Kamala Harris.

Compared to a hypothetical second Trump Administration, there is no comparison at all. This is one of those night-and-day choices between good and evil that you usually only find in fables. In the real world, choosing who to vote for doesn't get much cleaner or clearer than Biden vs. Trump.

But of course all of this reason operates on the literal level. On the meta level, the expectations game rules everything, aided by the phenomenon of political momentum. If the media frenzy actually is representative of public opinion, or is shaping public opinion in this direction, such that the American public genuinely has lost confidence in Joe Biden, that's it. That's game over. If Biden is on the ballot we'll lose the election and there's no stopping it at all. The fact that this could happen when America stands on the cusp of openly embracing fascism via the Republican Party is horrifying and bewildering and alienating, but America as a whole will always choose right-wing extremism over "weakness." Every Republican presidential nominee since Reagan has tried to argue, in one way or another, that their Democratic opponent is a weakling.

It's quite revealing, and troubling, that the Republican campaign, and even Donald Trump himself, have hung back and said very little in the past week. Trump is even delaying his vice presidential announcement, and will likely do so just long enough to let Biden stew as long as possible in the news cycle before Trump steals back the spotlight for himself just as Biden hypothetically but presumably starts to move on from the worst of this crisis.

Taking the meta into consideration, I think there are two key things to consider:

The first is that we should revisit the idea that replacing a presidential candidate so late in the process is actually political suicide. It was, for many decades. but now? Part of me wonders if the American public isn't sufficiently transformed from its past self that it might actually be a political boon to replace Biden: Doing so would completely quell the unease about his age while leaving the Republicans with limited time to construct a smear campaign against his replacement. Yesterday's "Replacing their guy after the primaries are over is weak!" might just be replaced with "Phew! Thank goodness. I don't want Trump but I was really worried about Biden."

If this were attempted, then win or lose it would be a major experiment in the American project, and would set a new benchmark of political reality in this country for decades to come. If replacing a candidate late in the race is actually viable, that would absolutely change partisan political campaign strategy going forward. And if the Democrats ended up losing as decisively as they would have in the past, we'll know with some confidence that the old law still stands. (This potentially conflates the act of replacing a candidate with the fact of the strengths and weaknesses of the replacement candidate, but even if the data were noisy they would still be illuminating.)

The other thing we need to consider is the same question that has been on my mind all year: I have been saying for a while now that, whichever way America votes in November, we are going to get what we deserve. If Biden stays on the ballot and we reelect him, that's going to mean a continuation of normalcy and democracy, and we'll have earned it by powering through our worries about Joe Biden specifically and still voting for the only legitimate candidate. And if Biden stays on the ballot and loses to Trump, we will no longer as a nation deserve this free land we have built and kept for ourselves. We will deserve the descent into fascism which has long been menacing us and which will inevitably accelerate in the years to come.

America's soul, and future, are on the line this year. And if not enough Americans think America's soul and future are worth saving because they're upset that Joe Biden is old, then damn them. Damn them all to Trump. And for the rest of my life, whether it be long or short, I will hold in contempt all Americans who were eligible to cast a vote for Joe Biden this year but did not. And in all my thinking going forward, they will be damned to second-class citizens, whether they be left or right or center, because they will be idiots and fools of the most glaring quality, short-sighted to the point of self-destruction, and they will not be trustworthy ever again in any matter requiring judgment beyond the scope of a thimble.

Old-timers of mine may know that I am not actually a lowercase "d" democrat. I don't believe in democracy. I have embraced it, especially in recent years, as "the best system we've got," and I think it still is that, whether or not Americans reject their own freedom and interests this November. But the horrifying "Amtrak Joe" (😢) train wreck that's playing out in slow motion in American society right now with regard to this election is a living case study in why and how otherwise-powerful democracies fail. If, in the 21st century, too many Americans are too dumb to see our situation for what it is, then there is probably no saving the idea that people are the best arbiters of their own interests.

As for what I would do: I would have a hard time withdrawing my support for someone who forgave the student loans that I thought I was going to die with. I've had those debts for over twenty years. The interest outpaces my ability to pay. I'd put in thousands of dollars of payments but hadn't moved the needle at all; in fact I was gradually losing ground. I have every confidence in Joe Biden's administration, regardless of his personal health, which I can't be sure of one way or the other.

I would keep Biden on the ballot, and make the argument that his administration has been professional and effective and that Biden himself could be ably succeeded as president by Harris if need be. That's good enough for me, even if I might wish I had greater confidence in Biden specifically.

But if Biden is going to be replaced, it has to happen now. This month, in the first half of this month if at all possible—two or three weeks at the absolute most. It should be Kamala Harris, because even though she was never my preference for president in 2020 and I would be very unlikely to pick her over the alternatives in the next open Democratic primary season, she is the current vice president and is the only one who could replace Biden at the top of the ticket without it feeling like a violation of the public trust by the Democratic Party establishment. Anyone else would be a bait-and-switch, but the vice president's literal job is to replace the president when needed. There could be no direr formulation of that supposition than this.

by The Curious Tale |  Read more:

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[ed. 100 percent. Except for the Kamala recommendation. I've never made a secret of my support for Elizabeth Warren (ie., the smartest person in the room). I'd also support Michelle Obama. I guess. A two-fer and a chance to redo the milquetoast policies of her husband's former administration. And, who says it has be another politician, anyway? There are hundreds of more capable people in business, science, education, etc.]