Look, he had to go. You knew it and I knew it and everybody but Biden himself knew it until today, when apparently he suddenly knew it too. The tributes to his selflessness and virtue and the glorious choice Biden has made tickled my memory of the last Great Badgering during a presidential race, a deservedly long-forgotten moment. In the spring of 1996, with Bob Dole running 15 points behind Bill Clinton, the idea arose suddenly in right-wing circles that Bob Dole could not effectively run as the Republican nominee with his attention divided due to his role as Senate Majority Leader. People pestered him in print and pestered him and pestered him until Dole finally agreed to quit his beloved Senate entirely on June 11, 1996, saying, “I have nowhere to go but the White House or home.”
We cheered. Oh, how we cheered. I wrote a cover story for the Weekly Standard called “Dole Breaks Free,” and the illustration was of Dole as Gulliver pulling himself up from the Lilliputian ropes tying him down.
It was all argle-bargle. Dole was never going to win, the idea that his departure from the Senate would make a difference was some cockamamie delusion, and if he had stayed and remained as Senate Majority Leader after his defeat, Dole would have been happier and wouldn’t have done a Viagra commercial. But when you see a thing happening that seems like a train wreck and you think maybe there’s a way to avoid the train wreck you get all excited about your solution—even if your solution ends up invoking not the salvation of your cause but the working-out of the “trolley problem.”
So, yes, Biden had to go. But the solution here is probably no solution. I’m not saying Kamala Harris can’t win the presidency against Donald Trump. The Lord is the only one who knows, and given how He’s altered reality for the past 25 days, I wouldn’t put it past Him to keep throwing us for loops because, let’s face it, we’re sinners and we’re bad and we deserve everything we’re getting. We have the greatest country on earth, the greatest constitution, the greatest economy, the greatest everything, and we’ve ended up fostering a political culture so generally nauseating that even Screwtape must be feeling a little sorry for us.
But left to her own devices and without some form of divine or demonic or newsy intervention, Kamala Harris is exceedingly unlikely to win the presidency. I say this because we saw her in action as a candidate for a year in 2019. She was so extraordinarily bad at it she had to drop out of the race in December before voters—any voters—let her know in no uncertain terms how much she stank up the joint. Had it not been for Biden’s pledge to pick a token vice president—I mean, when you say you’re going to pick a woman of color, you are literally tokenizing the office—she would likely be a relatively obscure member of the Senate.
Why do I say this? Because she’s been a relatively obscure vice president. She has not risen even to the barely discernible standards of the world’s least consequential office. Moreover, to the extent that people even think about her, they just don’t like her very much. We know this because polling tells us so, not because Fox News tells us so. Her approval rating is 38.6 percent. That is very bad. It’s so bad that Donald Trump’s approval rating is higher.
What the Democrats who are now doing a St. Vitus Dance of ecstasy over the change in their fortunes are not reckoning with is that the entire appeal of the Democratic party in 2020 was its seeming stability as opposed to Donald Trump’s unsteadiness in a crisis. Well, the country has been in a crisis for 25 days as it reckons with the meaning of its infirm president, and you know which party looks unstable? It’s not Trump’s party.
It’s the party that began going after Biden’s jugular literally only days after viciously attacking people for the crime of showing Biden on video doing things he has doing on video—sitting down on non-existent chairs, wandering off on a battlefield, moving like a human Roomba. It’s a party that spends three weeks stabbing its leader in the back. It’s the party that insists their guy is fine but on background insists he isn’t fine, and that he’s staying in the race until one minute before he decides to get out of the race. It’s the party that is going to hand Kamala Harris the nomination without any actual known procedure that will allow it to happen; they will be writing the rules as they go. That might have bee fine when Democrats pulled a switcheroo in a New Jersey senate race 22 years ago. Maybe. But it looks underhanded, and shifty, and weird.
And mostly, it makes them look unstable. So now Trump is the stability candidate. Also he’s the change candidate. So he gets both stability and change. Good luck, guys. You’re going to need it. And luck seems like the last thing Democrats can count on any longer.
