More On The 2024 Dilemma

I ran into a piece by Walter Shapiro at The New Republic, The Real Reason Why Biden Shouldn’t Drop Out:

Panicked Democrats, vibrating with anxiety over the polls, continue to nurture an unlikely fantasy: Joe Biden looks at his family across the Thanksgiving table on Nantucket and says with a weary sigh, “I can’t do this for another five years. I’ve tried my best. But I just don’t have the stamina to keep going through 2028.”

Nothing in the president’s makeup suggests that he would abruptly jettison his reelection campaign. . . . Every sign emanating from his inner circle and reelection campaign suggests a stubborn refusal to even acknowledge his growing legion of Democratic doubters. But even if Biden were to accept the truth embedded in the polls, as Harry Truman did when he bowed out in 1952, the subsequent multicandidate scramble for the Democratic nomination would create as many (if not more) political problems as it would solve.

This echoes David Axelrod, who says, "It's very late to change horses; a lot will happen in the next year that no one can predict & Biden's team says his resolve to run is firm." But Shapiro goes into detail on the downside for anyone who thinks about stepping in if, as seems unlikely, Biden will withdraw even this early in the cycle:

If Biden announced on the Monday after Thanksgiving that he would be retiring, it would give 2024 presidential contenders fewer than 100 days to declare their candidacies and define their image before 14 states pick delegates on Super Tuesday, March 5. And 11 other states will be holding Democratic primaries later in March.

Organizing a campaign and raising the money at that pace would be gruelling enough. But candidates would also face high-intensity scrutiny from the media and the voters without any benefit from a learning curve. It would be the equivalent of opening a musical on Broadway without a single tryout and just three days of rehearsals.

. . . Those who have been watching the Republican debates (not necessarily a recommended activity) probably will have noticed that, in a technical sense, both Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis have grown more adept over the last three months. That is the learning curve at work.

. . . Even a globe-trotting governor like Newsom, who visited China last month, would be ill prepared for the full range of queries that would be immediately hurled at him as a presidential candidate—hourly questions about a cease-fire based on the latest glimmers of news from Gaza, repeated inquiries about the best Democratic strategy on Capitol Hill to keep the government open, and never-ending queries about how to finance proposed new government programs.

But he also raises an issue that I haven't seen from anyone else, the extent to which the McGovern wing of the Democrats has gained effective veto power over the past 50 years:

As president, Biden has papered over many of the ideological fissures in the party by being far more ambitious in his legislative agenda than his prior moderate reputation might have suggested.

This is a polite way of saying that the Democrat center, in the persons of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, has been forced to cave to the far left, in the form of the Squad and similar constituencies. They aren't papering over fissures so much as they're adopting the agenda, and the problem is that the putatively centrist leadership, Biden and Pelosi, have aged out, leaving no centrist equivalent to Bill Clinton to take over in their place. But there's no credible leftist to replace them, either:

But if the 81 year-old (as of today) Biden opted out of a second term based on age, presumably that would also leave Bernie Sanders (82) and maybe Elizabeth Warren (74) on the sidelines. An unanswered question under such a scenario: Who, if anyone, would emerge as the left-wing favorite in the primaries? There is no natural successor to Sanders or Warren being bandied about as a break-in-case-of-emergency option should Biden withdraw.

He thinks the major problem now confronting the Democrats is that among the current possibilities, none will have had the time to build a credible public profile as a candidate as the prinmary season gets under way. But I think this evades the reality of 2024: the primaries are going to be irrelevant to both parties. Trump's overwhelming polling lead will make Repulblican primary victories a formality. If Joe Biden withdraws, it won't be during the primary season; it will be either just before or just after the Democrat convention, avoiding any primary battle, which would simply expose the rift between the Democrat far left and shrinking center.

My scenario continues to be that Joe withdraws sometime next summer, and the party insiders under something like Rule F designate Newsom as Joe's successor but keep Kamala as vice presidential nominee. I'm not sure this will work at all, but it's probably the only possible strategy -- put someone new and young and arguably not quite such a rabid leftist at the top of the ticket and hope keeping Kamala will satisfy the rabid left, but this is a charade, and it leaves open the possibility for a third party challenge from the far left as well.