CHICAGO: The party elites’ Push to Remove Mr Biden from contention and install Ms Harris as the nominee betrayed the democratic process and public trust.
PROJECT ‘NO JOE!’
A few days after CNN’s Van Jones made these comments on live TV, US President Joe Biden announced on X (on Sunday, July 21) that he had decided to “stand down” from the presidential race. Jones was reacting to the White House (WH) announcement that Mr Biden was cancelling his public engagements because he had tested “positive” for Covid. His X handle also announced that Mr Biden “will speak to the Nation later this week.”
After his Covid scare, Mr Biden remained away from the public eye for several days and finally spoke to the nation on July 25.
DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY.
As former President Donald Trump accepted the nomination of the Republican Party in Milwaukee during the Republican National Conference (RNC, July 15-18), the Democrats appeared in complete disarray. Going into their convention (August 19-22, in Chicago), no one knew what the Democrat ticket would look like in the November presidential elections. Mr Biden, on his part, has endorsed his deputy—Vice President Kamala Harris. Many other high-profile democrats—both in and out of office—several members of Congress, governors, and mega-donors—corporate and Hollywood—endorsed Mr Biden’s decision. Congratulatory remarks poured in, and so did hagiographic commentary on Mr Biden.
Mr Biden’s health and mental acuity, a topic this author has discussed extensively in these pages, blew up during an abnormally early televised presidential debate between the two presumptive nominees—Mr Biden and Mr Trump—late last month. It prompted many prominent Democrats, including former President Obama, to ask Mr Biden to step aside.
A report in Politico describes the behind-the-scenes maneuvering in great detail. According to the report, Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House, “made clear that [the Biden camp] could do this the easy way or the hard way… She gave [the Biden camp] three weeks of the easy way” to bow out of the race. After holding the fort for a few days with his wife Jill and son Hunter, Mr Biden capitulated under pressure.
This episode resembled a palace coup and Soviet-era politicking in the former USSR, with the compliant US media playing TASS and Pravda in the engaging drama. “The anatomy of a “conspiracy theory” [that Mr Biden is a puppet of the managerial class] became a reality in just 18 months,” former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy posted on X.
KAMALA’S CORONATION
It did not take much for Ms Harris, Mr Biden’s anointed successor, to secure the backings of the majority of delegates barely a month before the Democrat National Convention (DNC) in Chicago. After keeping Mr Biden’s physical and mental health condition hidden from public scrutiny for months, if not years, the presidential debate exposed Mr Biden’s physical health and mental health vulnerabilities.
The primaries exposed the facade of democracy within the Democratic Party. Mr Biden and the Democrats employed all sorts of tricks to manipulate the primary process to make an extremely unpopular incumbent, Mr Biden, the presumptive nominee for the upcoming election in November.
The party elites’ Push to Remove Mr Biden from contention and install Ms Harris as the nominee betrayed the democratic process and public trust the second time.
There is a high probability that Mr Harris will be the Democrat Party’s nominee at the DNC in Chicago. When that happens, she will be one of the rare nominees, potentially the President, without winning a single primary. Ms Harris dropped out of the 2020 presidential race in December 2019 before a single primary vote was cast. Then, candidate Biden made Ms Harris his running mate despite her being critical of Mr Biden on race. Ms Harris had challenged Biden’s opposition to federally mandated busing when he was in the Senate. Harris’s statement, “That little girl was me!” drew intense media attention.
Ms Harris has consistently had a low approval rating as a VP to Mr Biden. Even among Indian Americans, one of the most reliable voting blocs of the Democrat Party, Ms Harris’ favourability is 54%, down 8 points from 62% in 2022, according to the recent APIA voter survey. Ms Harris’ office has also been called dysfunctional and marred with a high attrition rate among her staff.
FAILED ASSASSINATION BID
As Donald Trump was addressing a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, July 13, a bullet from a would-be assassin’s gun scraped through his right ear. The would-be assassin of Mr Trump was shot dead on the spot by the security agencies. Another rallygoer also died in the shooting.
To many, Mr Trump’s near assassination was shocking but not surprising. Mr Trump has been the target of vicious and vitriolic attacks from the day he declared his candidacy for the top US job on 16 June 2015. As Mr Trump’s stocks rose, his political opponents and the US mainstream media hounded him. Hilary Clinton, a former First Lady and Secretary of State of the United States, would sponsor an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that the Russians were colluding with Donald Trump to meddle in the US elections.
Mr Trump is one of the most vilified politicians in the media and other leftwing elite circles. Beyond political criticism, Mr Trump has been a target of political witchhunt. His opponents alleged that Mr Trump colluded with the Russians to interfere in the US elections. The investigation, led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, concluded that the investigation did not establish that the members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
Mr Trump was impeached twice by the partisan Democrat-majority US Congress. He has also been the target of intense lawfare where the Biden administration and the Democrats weaponized government agencies to prosecute and persecute him. He was slapped with several frivolous civil and criminal charges, and a sham case in New York convicted him in the “hush-money” case.
Mr Trump has often been compared with Hitler. The media projects him, without evidence, as a threat to democracy, claiming that a Trump administration will be a totalitarian government trampling on democratic principles and human rights. Many Democrats, including some high-raking functionaries, have openly called for physical violence against Mr Trump.
In an increasingly polarized America where states are increasingly turning into single-party democracies, a few swing states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, etc.—are expected to play an oversized pivotal role in the coming elections.
(The author is a Chicago-based award-winning columnist.)