It Isn't Over By A Long Shot

On succeeding to the presidency following Nixon's resignation, Gerald Ford said in part.

I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our Government but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad.

In all my public and private acts as your President, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end.

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.

In that case, Nixon had resigned, a final and unambiguous act, and the electorate was at least tentatively willing to believe that the problem was specific to Nixon, and it culd be solved simply by replacing Nixon with Ford. But if one thing is plain from Joe's withdrawal as a candidate for the November election, the nightmare isn't ending, and Joe's mere withdrawal as a candidate is neither final nor unambiguous.

Trump, whose instincts over the past year have been remarkable, edges closer to the real issue here: Joe is out of the race, but nothing has changed, tomorrow's going to be same lies, different day. Joe -- or at least his puppetmasters -- are still running the country, and for now, we've simply got his surrogate Kamala. The Republicans, including Speaker Johnson and vice president nominee J D Vance, are taking the line that if Joe isn't fit to run for president, he isn't fit to serve as president, and other ommentators are beginning to agree.

The problem for Kamala, at least as long as Joe remains president but she runs as the presumptive nominee, is that while she has to defend Joe's policies, she can't do anything to change them. For instance, she's powerless to tell Secretary Mayorkas to make any change at all at the border, even if she's forced to acknowledge the Biden policies are deeply flawed. But if she were to make any change, it could begin to establish her as a serious candidate and potentially increase her slim electoral prospects. That option remains out of reach as long as Joe is president.

The second immediate problem will be the ongoing investigation into the Butler assassination attempt, linked with Secret Service Director Cheatle's refusal, at least so far, to resign. If Joe as continuing president continues to back her, this severely limits Kamala's own ability to seem decisive and independent, because firing Cheatle is a no-brainer. If any daylight begins to show between Kamala and Joe on this and other positions, it could benefit Kamala but prove unacceptable to Joe.

The third problem is the underlying circumstance of this year's front-loaded presidential campaign. The reality is that the campaign actually began last fall with Trump's New York civil trials, continued through the Atlanta debacle, culminated in Joe's disastrous June 27 debate performance, and was put out of reach with the failed Butler assassination attempt followed immediately by the Republican convention. Reports are that Joe dropped out of the campaign Sunday when it became clear that he no longer had any potential route to 270 electoral votes.

When Biden huddled with his two closest advisers Saturday, the information they provided on polling and where top Democratic officials stood underscored that a path to victory was “basically nonexistent,” according to another person familiar with the matter.

There wasn’t any single poll number, wavering Democratic official or fundraiser presented in the meeting with longtime aides Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti that pushed Biden toward his decision, the person said.

Instead, the information highlighted that the path back to a viable campaign had been severely damaged by declining national and swing-state poll numbers, along with party defections that were likely to rapidly accelerate. The information included polling and details gathered from outreach outside Biden’s inner circle.

This is another way of saying that the election was lost months before November. In large part, this was Joe's own doing, by initiating politically driven court cases that began to come to trial last year, reinforced by his own choice of an unprecedentedly early first debate. The problem was Trump's instinctive ability to turn each legal setback for the Democrats into a personal political victory, followed by Joe's clear defeat in the June 27 debate, which had the predicted effect of giving the Democrats plenty of time to dump Joe before the August convention. But dumping Joe won't fix anything, because Kamala.

As a result, we have a continuing constitutional crisis that's begun to morph from the fairly simple question of whether a president is fit for office, into the problem that the November election has been decided months in advance, with the question of who's running the country up in the air until January 20, when every indication is that the opposition party will take over then, but the country will drift in the meantime with uncertain leadership.

One solution, as I've already suggested, is for Joe to resign as president,be succeeded briefly by Kamala, who would also resign, to be succeeded in the constitutional line by Speaker Johnson, a Republican, who could serve as a Trump standin until January.

Given the unprecedented events we've had up to now, I don't think this can be ruled out.