THIS SUMMER OF SURPRISE
A month ago, Joe Biden, less than a week removed from what -- charitably speaking -- was a bad debate, was intent on running for re-election.
Today, Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee.
If someone tells you they saw this coming . . .
They are lying.
At multiple levels.
In contemporary American politics, there are a number of truths that until recently you could take to the bank.
One is that presidents who have won all their party's primaries and secured all the delegates needed to be their party's nominee will run for reelection. Another is that no one can secure the nomination of either party absent a years long slog through the snow, sun and rust belts, umpteen debates with a cadre of competitors, and tens of millions of dollars raised to finance the effort. Yet a third is that, if the Democratic Party can figure out a way to divide its way to defeat, or at the very least create enough process to render that outcome unnervingly possible, it will do so.
Each of those truths, if not forever discarded, has been rendered -- for now at least -- inoperative.
All of them, however, became truths as a matter of cold historic fact.
No president running for reelection with the nomination sewn up has decided not to run at the eleventh hour.
And since 1968, no Democrat has secured his party's nomination without winning primaries and amassing the required number of delegates.
In fact, 1968 was a watershed year for Democratic Party politics in America.
The Democrats disarray at their convention in Chicago that year -- along with the nomination of a candidate who had not participated in any primaries and then lost the general election -- led to the wholesale revision of the party's rules for selecting candidates. Under changes advanced by the party's McGovern-Fraser commission, the power of state committees peopled and run largely by insiders was curtailed and primaries became the only road to the White House.
Every open contest since then has been a robust multi-candidate (and multi-year) affair.
And if the polls showed you were a weak incumbent . . .
As they did in 1980 . . .
Even a sitting president could face a robust challenge.
So what happened this year?
Biden has been behind (or at best even) in the polls for the entire year. He was widely perceived as being too old to do the job through the end of any second term. And his approval rating nationally was dipping below 40%.
None of this, however, attracted any significant opposition.
And the opposition it did attract -- from Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips -- was anemic.
A write-in campaign for Biden beat Phillips in New Hampshire and Biden won by overwhelming margins in all their handful of head-to-head contests thereafter.
Until Biden announced he was leaving the race, therefore, there was no expectation that he was prepared to do so.
Nor was there any widespread belief that the search for a new nominee would be anything less than chaotic and divisive even if Biden belied those expectations and stepped aside. To the contrary, Vice President Harris was almost as unpopular as the President himself and a half dozen sitting governors and/or members of the cabinet -- Shapiro, Cooper, Whitmer, Pritzker, Newsome, Buttigieg -- were considered more than likely to enter any open field.
So . . .
Again . . .
What happened?
Why did Biden decide to get out?
Why was Kamala Harris able to secure the nomination without a fight?
Why, again contrary to expectations, has she been able to turn the race into an actual contest, one in which she appears to be resurrecting the Democrats winning 2020 coalition -- suburban women, minorities, the young and those with college degrees -- and along with it their chances of retaining the White House and Senate and winning the House?
Here's my take.
If there is one person uniquely surrounded these days by what is unexpected, that person is Donald Trump. Whether he is winning an election in 2016 that everyone (including Trump himself) thought he'd lose, spinning out lies at a rate and in an amount that creates a whole new genre of journalism called fact-checking, orchestrating an attempted coup based on the lie that he won an election he lost, being impeached twice or surviving assassination by mere centimeters, the man is a one-off. There has never been anyone in American politics like him, at least not one like him who actually became president.
So, if you want to understand why Joe Biden decided to opt out of running for re-election, the best place to begin (and probably end) is . . .
Donald Trump.
Biden believes, quite correctly, that Trump represents an existential threat to American democracy. There is no way in his mind to sugar-coat that threat. Trump has produced a handful of profiles in courage over the past eight years, chief among them Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, the nine other Republican House members who voted to impeach him in 2021 and the six other Republican senators who voted to convict him.
Biden must now be added to that list.
He left the race for two reasons.
First, because he knew he could lose.
And second, because he feared the country could not survive a second Trump term.
All the other explanations are, to my mind, fanciful, false or both.
I've met conservatives who think the departure is just the culmination of elite gaslighting that kept the country in the dark about the president's cognitive disabilities. There is no medical evidence to support this claim and Biden himself regularly refutes it. He even did so in the process of getting out, assiduously managing the diplomatic tour de force that released Americans Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan, Alsu Kurmasheva and thirteen other political prisoners from Russian and Belarusian jails, and actually calling Slovenia's leader to cement its needed cooperation even as he was finishing the letter announcing his departure from the race.
The same can be said of those who credit Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the members of Congress who advocated withdrawal or . . .
George Clooney.
Biden had the votes.
If he wanted the nomination, there was no way to stop him from getting it.
He could have told everyone to pound sand.
Almost any other politician, including those now being credited as backstage authors of his exit, would have.
But he didn't.
Because he knows the risk of another Trump term is too great to accept, let alone make possible.
It is important that America understand that risk as well.
Over the course of the last year, a sort of somnambulant amnesia has settled over the country about Trump in general and the risk he portends specifically. Apologists have turned his lying into exaggeration, his narcissism into toughness and January 6 into a mere protest whose tried, convicted and jailed participants are now considered victims. Labelling Trump a fascist is dismissed as over-the -top rhetoric even though erstwhile Republicans like Robert Kagan, who served in Ronald Reagan's State Department, have admitted "it is hard to find a better word for Trump the leader and his devoted following. Fascism is the malady to which modern democracies are particularly susceptible."
Kagan's latest book, Rebellion: How Anti-Liberalism Is Tearing America Apart Again, was published just this year. In it, he notes that "It took Hitler nine years, from his failed putsch in 1923 to his electoral triumph in 1932, to complete the destruction of German democracy. In that period, his following grew from thousands to tens of millions. Trump's assault on American democracy arguably began in 2020, when he refused to accept his defeat at the polls. His rolling coup attempt has continued and grown since, and along with it the determination of millions of his followers to see him returned to power by whatever means necessary."
In January 2021, Kagan continues, "fully 71 percent of Republicans polled believed Joe Biden was not 'legitimate.' Little wonder that, at Trump's command, thousands of his supporters tried to do something about it . . . The majority were middle class and middle aged [and as] one fifty-six year old Michigan woman explained: 'We weren't there to steal things. We weren't there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.'" As Kagan explains, "Hitler" too "came to power in Germany first by winning democratic elections, by inspiring middle class Germans, by offering an alternative to the messy, often gridlocked democracy of Weimar Germany. Only then did he cement his position in power by doing away with democratic norms."
"This," Kagan concludes, "is the Republican Party. Trump and his supporters have taken over the party and now seek to take over the country by any means necessary and put an end to the American experiment in liberalism."
If Trump explains Biden's decision to depart, he also explains the Democratic Party's decision to immediately coalesce around and support Kamala Harris.
Biden himself led the charge, endorsing her within a half hour of bowing out. Just as quickly, her would-be opponents did the same. All the talk about a mini-campaign or an open convention with days of yore drama evaporated. Instead, the Democratic base woke up and in mere weeks, Harris raised $300 million, chose a Minnesota everyman as her running mate, hosted Obama-sized rallies, closed the national polling gap and is now leading in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.
I am suspicious of polls.
And months out, I do not think they are all that predictive.
The current change in public perception, however, has been abrupt and immediate.
In two of the three midwestern swing states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Trump has lost between seven and eight points, and in Michigan he has lost a little more than five. In June he was leading in all three states. Today, he is not. The largest documented change, however, was on the question of satisfaction among Democrats. In May, only 60% of the Democrats polled were satisfied with the choice of candidates in this year's presidential election. Now, 87% of them are.
Why the shift?
It isn't about policy. On that. Harris and Biden are more or less identical. I also doubt it's just about demographics. While Harris has regained some of the minority voters Biden was losing and gained appreciably with women, she has retained the same numbers of older voters Biden attracts and she might have been expected to lose. The increased satisfaction and enthusiasm is, I believe, based on the view that Harris can win.
That perception is a sail behind which there is a lot of wind.
Correctly or not, the voters as a whole were dissatisfied with having to choose between an actual and a near octogenarian. Biden was more or less running within the margin of error but still behind Trump until the June 27 debate. Afterwards, he was losing nationally by a larger margin and losing outside the margin of error in the swing states. Once Biden removed himself from the mix, all that changed. Trump is now the candidate with an age problem. Harris is now (ironically) the candidate of change and Trump is shackled by his own prior incumbency.
One of the lesser noticed tells in the Times/Siena poll is that voters are also giving Harris better marks on the economy than they were giving Biden. On the merits this makes no sense at all. Her economic policies and his are the same. What voters are probably doing is moving from dissatisfaction to engagement and in the process taking a second look at the conventional nonsense that has favored Trump on this issue.
Trump's COVID economy was an absolute disaster and his pre-COVID economy inherited. The sticking point has been inflation, which rose sharply after COVID crippled supply chains. Though the rate is now dramatically down, absolute prices are higher than they were in 2019. Trump and the GOP blame this all on Biden's spending. That, however, cannot be right inasmuch as the rate came down as COVID ended and the Fed raised interest rates. The likelier culprit is corporate greed. Since 2019, experts attribute 4.5% of the cumulative 17% increase in prices to the rise in corporate profit margins at rates much higher than the growth in labor and non-labor costs. In fact, those margins are the highest (16%) they've been since the 1960s.
As has always been the case, the only party willing to battle corporate greed in America are the Democrats. Toward that end, the Biden administration has resurrected antitrust law, lowered prescription drug prices, attacked junk fees, fought shrink-flation, increased the minimum wage and called for an increase in corporate taxes. At the same time, real wage growth has outpaced inflation so the gains have not vanished. And going forward, building the economy from the middle out and the bottom-up has new (and younger) spokes-people in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
In opposition, when he is not otherwise losing it about (his and her) crowd sizes or recounting non-existent helicopter rides with Willie Brown, Trump preaches a politics of revenge and recrimination. He is a convicted felon and an indicted defendant; the only thing that may keep him out of jail is a Supreme Court that has written a blank immunity check against prosecuting presidents for the crimes they commit while on duty. He will pardon convicted J6 defendants and any others who do his bidding while violating the law. His new running mate is becoming a punch line; his last one won't vote for him.
On policy, such (and thin) as it is, he pretends to oppose inflation but can never say how he will do so. It is the same with Ukraine or the middle east or hostages. He always claims to have done better even when he hasn't and pretends to have a plan even when he doesn't.
Joe Biden agreed to a bi-partisan immigration bill created and widely supported by the GOP; Trump killed it.
Joe Biden passed the bi-partisan infrastructure bill; Trump couldn't.
Joe Biden restored NATO; Trump trashes it and praises Vladimir Putin.
When he accepted Kamala Harris's invitation to join her on the Democratic ticket, Governor Walz thanked her for bringing back the politics of joy.
It was an apt characterization.
She has done so.
With her laugh, ready smile and funny (but spot on) memes.
But also with her readiness and steely resolve to continue the job begun in 2021.
America's voters don't settle.
They bitch and moan and groan and complain.
They know elections are about them.
Those running better know it too.
They want it all.
A thriving economy.
Equal opportunity.
Fundamental rights.
And democracy.
Opposing fascism is not enough.
But welcoming it would be a disaster.
I saw a sign recently that captured all of this.
In two words.
It said . . .
"Kamala, obviously!"
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