Wishful Thinking

Over the weekend there was an uptick in calls from various quarters for Joe Biden to step down from his intent to run for reelection next year, but I think the attempts by B-listers like Steven Hayward to see reason for optimism are just wishful thinking.

I still say Biden won’t be the Democratic nominee next year. And I think there’s a 50/50 chance that if Biden doesn’t drop out of his own volition, Gavin Newsom will decide some time this fall to jump in the race, with a “more in sorrow than anger” announcement that praises Biden for his good deeds, but that it’s time for a generational shift. Don’t think Newsom and his advisers aren’t weighing this possibility.

The big factor that Hayward and the others who think this way are leaving out is that Biden is basically the last Democrat who can remotely claim to lead a fusion party that unites what's left of the New Deal coalition -- which, recall, once comprised labor, Catholics, immigrants, Jews and other ethnics, Southern segregationists, and Ivy League gentry. Substantial numbers of most of these have left the party over the past two generations, while Southern segregationists have effecttively disappeared.

The traditional members of the New Deal coalition have been replaced by greens, radical feminists, parlor leftists, queer theorists, race hustlers, and the urban criminal class. The challenge for Democrats has been to keep these groups off center stage, either by bumping them aside and triangulating a la Bill Clinton, or co-opting them a la Barack Obama. Without a strong leadership figure who can do either while maintaining some semblance of party unity, there's no chance of building a winning electoral coalition, since the Republicans have begun to occupy the center.

This has been the Democrat dilemma for the past several election cycles -- it's Bernie Sanders or a more moderate-seeming alternative like Hillary or Joe Biden. Bernie Sanders was at least a cis white male, while Joe Biden was both that and a seeming moderate. The problem is that Bernie is even older than Joe, while Hillary is not in good health. Joe is the last viable Democrat figure, all the others who are younger are too closely associated with the new Democrat factions.

Note that Mr Hayward expects Gavin Newsom to step in and supplant Joe. But Newsom is not the same kind of Californian as Nixon or Reagan. He's tied too closely to Covid lockdowns, poop on the streets, crime, homelessness, and high taxes-- and this leaves aside that he's a leader in the only state policy initiative so far to raise the possibility of reparations for the descendants of African slaves by appointing a task force to study the issue.

Newsom signed the task force into law in 2020, touting California being the first state to study reparations and calling the bill a corrective to the “structural racism and bias built into and permeating throughout our democratic and economic institutions” without explicitly embracing monetary compensation.

The difficulty is that the task force came up with a recommendation that those eligible receive up to $1.2 million in reparations, while individual members of the task force have been demanding other measures like abolishing child support payments for African-American fathers. The dilemma for Democrat candidates at this point is that either they endorse measures like this, which will alienate not just whites but Latins and Asians, who'll have to pay reparations as well, or they don't, which will bring down the wrath of the reparations hustlers and their allies.

This is a problem Newsom has brought on himself just by opening the door to it, but of course, he did this in an attempt to appease the reparations hustler wing of his party within California in the first place. His nomination in 2024 would simply assure a substantial number of Democrats supporting a third-party candidate. Mr Hayward is the expert who's paid to think this through; I have no idea why it kasn't occurred to him.

The lizard people behind Biden will simply veto any potential Newsom candicacy on the basis that Newsom will be unelectable in the general, while Biden has proven that, whatever may happen down the road, he's been elected once.

By the same token, Kamala Harris isn't electable, but the bigger issue is that no other potential Democrat candidate, such as those who ran in the 2020 primaries, is an arguable national figure who can campaign on behalf of the old New Deal coalition. They all represent individual new factions, the greens, radical feminists, parlor leftists, queer theorists, race hustlers, and the urban criminal class. They all face the Bud Light dilemma, where on one hand, they'll offend one group, but if they try to turn around and satisfy that group, they'll offend someone else, and in the end, nobody wants their product.

The Democrat strategy is going to be to tough it out over Joe, because they don't have any choice. Whatever issue comes up, coke in the Sit Room, bribes from the Chicomms, stumbles, mumbles, and falls, they're going to say nothing, hope things blow over, and basicaly claim that bad as Joe is, he isn't Trump.

What they need to do is somehow contain Robert Kennedy Jr, because his threat is that he comes off as less wacky than legacy media wants to make out, and for some segment of voters, who will mostly be Democrats left over from the old New Deal coalition nostalgic for a Kennedy, he'll be better than Joe but not Donald Trump.

My problem with Kennedy is that he has cogent things to say about vaccines, but he also wants to legalize psychedelics.