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Biden and Harris must go
For months US Democrats have been wondering why voters were not supporting Joe Biden. He has been a good president, and enacted many worthy reforms. Donald Trump, by contrast, is clearly a dictator in the making.
The idea that American voters have elderly relatives and (love them though they do), know that an 81-year-old cannot take on a tough job, let alone stay in post until he is 86, did not seem to occur to them.
Ah, Democrats were saying only this week, Trump is as rambling and senile as Biden. Maybe, but you need a candidate who can beat Trump not match his mental and physical decline.
In any case, in last night’s debate Biden looked in a far, far worse state than Trump.
So Democrats added a new coping strategy. They blamed the debate moderators for not fact-checking Trump.
‘Trump is just lying and making stuff up’, complained a progressive academic ‘But he says it “vigorously” and doesn’t get fact-checked. Therefore, he’s winning.’
To which the only serious answer is: get real.
You are in a fight to save your democracy. You can’t expect others to do your fighting for you. You must win yourselves. No one else will save you if you do Trump a favour and field Biden, who has been a good president, but is now clearly too old, and Kamala Harris, who is so fantastically unpopular only about a quarter of Americans think she is doing a decent job.
In the interests of defending democracy, she must go too. Otherwise, Trump will run on the slogan of vote Biden and get Harris when Biden dies. Given that three quarters of Americans don’t want Harris, there’s a distinct possibility that the tactic will pay off.
The fixers, the men in smoke-filled rooms, the elite insiders ought to intervene now. But because of liberal reforms in the 1970s, which I think most British readers do not understand, America’s smoke-filled rooms were fumigated long ago.
Indeed, it is far from clear if anyone can intervene, and a comparison with the UK helps explain why.
Say what you like about the Parliamentary Conservative party, and by God there is plenty to say, when it needed to get rid of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, it kicked them out in a matter of days.
In their presidential system, American elites used control nominations. If the US had its old political regime, state delegates at the Democratic Convention in Chicago next month would be ‘unpledged’: and free to negotiate their vote on the convention floor. In the old regime, party leaders could point out the obvious that Biden and Harris were unfit to run. With their control over government jobs, perks, and other benefits they could sweeten deals with bribery and corruption as their predecessors did. They would have alternatives in place, who would have been out introducing themselves to the US public.
Let’s not romanticise the old system of party bosses. Insiders were white, male and middle- or upper-class. In the southern United States, they presided over an Apartheid system. They were an old-boys’ network, and a good, old boys’ network at that. But they patrolled the borders of the system, and in the 1920s were able to stop Henry Ford, who admired fascism as Trump admires Putinism, from running.
Disgust at the Vietnam war, and the racial and political violence of the 1960s, drove liberals to believe that the American system was rotten. I am sure if you and I had been there at the time we would have felt the same. The cry went up to let the activists decide, not the elite politicians in Washington.
From 1972, most of the delegates to both the Democratic and Republican conventions were elected in state-level primaries and caucuses. Delegates were preselected by the candidates themselves to ensure their loyalty.
This meant that, for the first time, the people who chose the parties’ presidential candidates would be neither beholden to party leaders nor free to make backroom deals at the convention; rather, they would faithfully reflect the will of their state’s primary voters.
The road to hell is paved with constitutional reforms and the US is in its own version of hell now.
Democratisation led to the election of Donald Trump. If you can remember 2016, you will recall the mounting incredulity in Republican party elites that such a man could be their candidate, then the pathetic acceptance that he was the activists’ choice, and the final scramble of careerists to ingratiate themselves with their new master.
Republican fixers could not ban Trump from standing then. Now Democrat fixers cannot stop Biden running again. They have lost control over the system.
The best they can hope is that Biden will listen to the pleas of Democratic party politicians to step aside. (One told the Financial Times after the debate that there was a ‘higher level of panic than I’ve seen or thought possible.’)
There is no guarantee that he will. Throughout his career Biden has displayed levels of vanity that are exceptionally high, even for a politician, and thought himself the victim of snooty rivals who were determined to do him down.
You’d hope his wife would tell him the game was up. For if he runs, the next few months will be horrendous.
If it looks like Biden is losing, and remember he was behind in the polls even before last night’s debate, other Democratic party politicians running for office will disassociate themselves from him.
But suppose he does retire with grace. Then there could a blast from the past: an open convention where delegates would be free to pick the best candidate. There are risks. Civil war between left and right would play into the hands of Donald Trump.
Once again you would feel the urgent need for fixers, who might impose the Democrat politician who stands the best chance of defeating Trump at the convention. And once again you look around for the men in the smoke-filled rooms and find they aren’t there.
But an open convention remains the best of many bad options the Democrats now have.
We will see in the next few days whether Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, or Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, or other prominent Democrats have the courage and patriotism to put themselves forward and go on whirlwind campaigns.
Meanwhile, Keir Starmer’s first task as prime minister will be coming to terms with how the hell the UK and Europe defend themselves if the US falls to Donald Trump, a Putin admirer, and France falls to Marine Le Pen.
Whacking up taxes to pay for increased defence spending will only be the start of it.
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