With former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley declaring her candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination, attention has rightly focused on which candidates will follow. Could Sen. Tim Scott be ready to declare? How about former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo? Or the big one: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis?
All in good time.
But on the Democratic side, we're still waiting to see if and when Joe Biden will make his reelection bid official. Yes, there's still an outside chance Biden surprises everyone and decides not to run again. While that would set off a scramble of epic proportions on the Democratic bench, it's still the outlier case.
But that doesn't mean Democrats are happy with the idea of having Biden run again. They read the polls showing even Democratic voters want someone else to run. And behind the scenes, and off the record, Democratic officials admit Biden is well past his sell-by date:
There was the senator who said few Democrats in the chamber want Biden to run again but that the party had to devise “an alignment of interest” with the president to get him off the “narcotic” of the office; there was the governor who mused about just how little campaigning Biden would be able to do; and there was the House member who, after saying that, of course, Democrats should renominate the president told me to turn off my phone and then demanded to know who else was out there and said Harris wasn't an option.
My favorite, though, was the Democratic lawmaker who recalled speaking to Jill Biden and, hoping to plant a seed about a one-term declaration of victory, told her how her husband should be celebrated for saving democracy. When I asked if I could use any of that on the record, the lawmaker shot back: “absolutely not.”
The herd will reluctantly get behind an aged Biden because it fears what might happen in VP Kamala Harris gets into the race. It would mean a scrum like the Democrats had in 2020 when Harris ran – poorly – and dropped out before voting began.
There's no reason to believe that Harris has become a better candidate since then. But there's also the issue of what happens to anyone who criticizes her:
Democrats have seen what happens when anyone in their party openly criticizes Harris — they're accused by activists and social-media critics of showing, at best, racial and gender insensitivity. This doesn't stifle concerns about her prospects, of course, it just pushes them further underground or into the shadows of background quotes.
That's not healthy at all – and in many ways, mirrors the way many Republicans treated Donald Trump in his losing 2020 reelection bid. Mutter darkly about him off the record…support him in public.
Republicans seem (for the moment) to be taking baby steps away from their own version of this behavior. But for Democrats? Their hopes seem to rest on an octogenarian incumbent who doesn't seem to be all there all the time because the alternative is too problematic for them to contemplate (on the record).
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Demonrats are a dilemma we face on a daily basis.