How Did The Lizard People Get Themselves Into This Pickle?

Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, MT, has become a regular at Real Clear Politics, which is an indication that whatever he writes is likely to be as cautiously conventional as you're likely to find. His piece today is Who Engineered the Political Coup Against Biden? The title suggests he's going to veer into the sort of Ferdinand Lundberg territory that I favor, the populist notion that a cabal of wealthy families controls US politics and media, but since this is RCP, there's no way that's going to happen.

And it didn't. He raises a potentially interesting point:

[Joe] had the delegates, and he had the nomination unless he willingly surrendered it. But something happened. About the same time Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt and raised his fist in defiance, Democrats seemed to have concluded that Biden could not win in November.

. . . [S]omeone needs to tell the truth about the 10 days that shook the nation, from the moment Trump took a would-be assassin’s bullet on July 13 to the afternoon Biden inexplicably dropped his reelection bid and Kamala Harris was coronated.

Yeah, OK, can we learn the gist of the phone calls among Laurene Powell Jobs, Alex Soros, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama when they decided Joe finally had to go? But Frank Miele being Frank Miele, this isn't what he wants to learn:

And the first question that needs to be answered, and which no one in the mainstream media is asking, is “Who convinced Joe Biden that debating Trump on June 27, nearly two months before the Democratic convention, was a good idea?”

But let's face it, that was just one blunder among maybe half a dozen big blunders that had Joe consistently behind in the polls since last fall. For instance, setting the June 27 debate was an efficient cause of the coup, but it wasn't a material cause, which lies in the bigger question of how Joe came to be surrounded by incompetent handlers, who variously brought about the failed "lawfare" strategy or prevented a 2024 Democrat primary process. If the June 27 debate didn't happen to cause Joe's candidacy to collapse, some other event would have. This is the point Miele misses, and he then proceeds to waste everyone's time for the rest of his essay.

The material cause of the coup, as far as I can see, was a Democrat strategy that began in 2016, which has been outlined by leaks from Biden family sources in recent days; viz, in 2016, Obama, presumably with the support of Laurene Powell Jobs, George Soros, Nancy Pelosi, and others, who for convenience I'll identify as the Lizard People, determined that Hillary Clinton was a better presidential candidate than Joe Biden, and they apparently prevailed on Joe not to run. Trump's victory in that election was a complete surprise.

By 2020, their goal was to beat Trump. The leading candidate in the primaries that year was Bernie Sanders, whom the Lizard People determined could not win against Trump. But once Joe won South Carolina by promising Rep James Clyburn that he would choose an African-American woman as his running mate, the Lizard People grudgingly got behind Joe as the only credible alternative to Sanders. And Joe, helped considerably by his handlers and the media who were able to sustain a basement campaign that minimized his incapacity, beat Trump, but at the cost of making Kamala his vice president.

The leaks from the Biden family suggest that Joe's support from the Lizard People was never wholehearted, and in fact, they were insufficiently grateful to Joe for beating Trump in 2020. Part of the Lizard People's ambivalence may stem from an initial expectation that Joe wouldn't run for re-election in 2024. This may have been closer to the material, rather than the efficient, cause for their coup over the past week -- this was a job they always knew needed doing, and they should have attended to it a year ago.

In fact, if they'd dissuaded Joe from running last year, there would never have been the "lawfare" blunders that resuscitated Trump's career, and quite possibly someone like Lynne Cheney or Mitt Romney would have secured the Republican nomination and lost to -- well, whom? Probably a young, attractive white guy Democrat, a Beto O'Rourke, a Pete Buttigieg, or even a Mark Kelly.

This in fact brings us to what the Biden family version suggests is now Obama's preferred nominee, or was until he finally endorsed Kamala yesterday, Mark Kelly, although Kelly is 60 and looks it. The problem is that Kelly, unlike Kamala, has never even tried to fun for president, and once Joe announced he was running for re-election, Kelly didn 't have the option in 2024. For the Lizard People to insert him into the line of succession at this point, having never even tried to run for national office, is just a little too contrived.

And we're back to the dilemma of 2020: the Lizard People knew Sanders wouldn't win against Trump. and now they've been forced to accept a 2024 DEI candidate whose policy positions are to the left of Sanders. If Kelly runs for vice president with Kamala on the ticket, he's ending his political career even if he stays in the Senate after the election. They might prevail on him to take a bullet for the party, but Kamala's still going to lose -- the implicit reason for taking Joe off the ticket was to save the down ballot Democrats, but the presidency is already lost.

So as far as I can tell, the Lizard People were asleep at the switch while their media arm continued to cover for Joe's increasing disability over the past several years, until it became too late to do anything about it. Even if Joe's handlers hadn't scheduled the June 27 debate, it was plain that Joe wasn't in a condition to conduct a re-election campaign, and if it wasn't a bad debate, it would have been something else. We still don't really know what led Joe's handlers to rush him back to Delaware from Las Vegas last week, for example.

It may well be that Joe did outsmart the Lizard People by choosing Kamala in 2020; she was in fact his insurance policy. He fell just a few months short of getting away with it. But why did the Lizard People let this happen when they had three years to deal with it? That's the question about which RCP continues to be deliberately obtuse.