The logistics of removing Biden and choosing a replacement..
by EricCartman (2024-01-11 12:12:24)

In reply to: Befuddled CNN panelists  posted by BeijingIrish

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make this a highly unlikely scenario, even thought it would be the correct move.

The Economist lambasted the Democrats for running Biden again, while noting how the party is basically pot committed and must push forward.

Back in 2023 Mr Biden could—and should—have decided to be a one-term president. He would have been revered as a paragon of public service and a rebuke to Mr Trump’s boundless ego. Democratic bigwigs know this. In fact before their party’s better-than-expected showing in the midterms, plenty of party members thought that Mr Biden would indeed stand aside. This newspaper first argued that the president should not seek re-election over a year ago.

Unfortunately, Mr Biden and his party had several reasons for him fighting one more campaign, none of them good. His sense of duty was tainted by vanity. Having first stood for president in 1987 and laboured for so long to sit behind the Resolute desk, he has been seduced into believing that his country needs him because he is a proven Trump-beater.

Likewise, his staff’s desire to serve has surely been tainted by ambition. It is in the nature of administrations that many of a president’s closest advisers will never again be so close to power. Of course they do not want to see their man surrender the White House in order to focus on his presidential library.

Here the Leader discusses the challenges of selecting a new candidate:

Were he to withdraw today, the Democratic Party would have to frantically recast its primary, because filing deadlines have already passed in many states and the only other candidates on the ballot are a little-known congressman called Dean Phillips and a self-help guru called Marianne Williamson. Assuming this was possible, and that the flurry of ensuing lawsuits was manageable, state legislatures would have to approve new dates for the primaries closer to the convention in August. A series of debates would have to be organised so that primary voters knew what they were voting for. The field could well be vast, with no obvious way of narrowing it quickly: in the Democratic primary of 2020, 29 candidates put themselves forward.

The chaos might be worth it if the party could be sure of going into the election with a young, electable candidate. However, it seems equally possible that the eventual winner would be unelectable—Bernie Sanders, say, a self-declared democratic socialist who is a year older than Mr Biden. More likely, the nomination would go to Kamala Harris, the vice-president. Ms Harris has the advantage of not being old, though it says something about the Democratic Party’s gerontocracy that she will be 60 in November and is considered youthful.

Unfortunately she has proven to be a poor communicator, a disadvantage in office as well as on the stump. Ms Harris is a creature of California’s machine politics and has never successfully appealed to voters outside her state. Her campaign in 2020 was awful. Her autocue sometimes seems to have been hacked by a satirist. Immigration and the southern border—a portfolio she handles for Mr Biden—is Mr Trump’s strongest issue and the Democrats’ weakest. Ms Harris’s chances of beating Mr Trump look even worse than her boss’s.



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