"It'll Be Fine. . . "

The public dialogue has been all about Trump's cabinet nominees, but the question that still won't go away for me, and nobody's talking about, is why the Democrat leadership never came up with a Plan B over Biden before the time to reoplace him was long past. The suggestions we had last summer were that at least by the start of the year, insiders were shocked at Joe's cognitive decline, but as far as I can tell, nobody did anything about it.

Isn't that where the history of the 2024 campaign should start? But that means we should go back to 2020. From February of that year:

Former Vice President Joe Biden's poor showing in the New Hampshire and Iowa primaries this week — and Bernie Sanders' strong performance in both — are terrifying the Democratic party's top managers and fundraisers.

We got to taste that fear when Obama-era Secretary of State John Kerry was overheard on a phone call in a hotel lobby in Des Moines, Iowa, telling someone that voters "now have the reality of Bernie" and it would lead to "the possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party — down whole."

At that point, the Democrat establishment focused on Joe as the best alternative to Sanders. By March,

The Democratic empire is quickly aligning its forces to strike back at Bernie Sanders.

First, billionaire Tom Steyer dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination after former Vice President Joe Biden romped to victory in the South Carolina primary Saturday.

Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., exited in quick succession Sunday and Monday and were expected to endorse Biden at a rally in Texas on the eve of the Super Tuesday contests that will pick roughly one-third of the delegates to the Democratic convention. Amid the candidate dominoes, a legion of current and former party officials threw their weight behind Biden, who had all but been left for dead by party elites a couple of weeks ago.

"It reflects the urgency of what we’re going into on Super Tuesday," said Adrienne Elrod, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton's bids for the presidency. "That's a big show of force that the left-of-center wing of the Democratic Party is consolidating around Joe because they understand what’s at stake, they understand the urgency, and they don’t want this to be handed to Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday."

This narrative suggests that Democrat insiders were fully aware of Joe's weaknesses, but the alternative was Sanders. The problem wasn't that Sanders was a red diaper baby -- they were all for that -- the problem was that the voters knew it, and Sanders couldn't win in November. In fact, it would be a repeat of 1972 or 1988; it could put the party's future in jeopardy.

So they decided to dress Joe up as a centrist and use Covid as an excuse to run a basement campaign. while also using the health scare to curtail Trump's ability to hold rallies. This covered up Joe's weaknesses as a campaigner while limiting Trump's strengths. Meanwhile, the deep state was used to discount issues like Hunter's laptop while planting the idea Trump was a Russian agent.

Finally, the Democrats could rely on big-city machines to manipulate the vote counts in key districts. This put Joe over the top, barely, that November. Once he was in, the people who really ran things could implement a program that was little different from anything Sanders could have imagined.

What puzzles me is that the Democrats on one hand were fully aware of both the weaknesses of their platform and the weaknesses of Joe as a candidate, but they never seem to have seen the need to adjust their strategy from the 2020 model, especially to find a replacement for Joe.

By 2024, Covid was no longer an excuse either to run a basement campaign or to claim Trump's rallies were a health risk. The Republicans had also learned a major lesson from 2020 and had teams of lawyers ready to challenge any attempts to delay counting, which paid off in places like Pennsylvania and Arizona, which had had those problems in 2020.

But the biggest question is still why Biden was allowed to run for a second term. It appears that behind the scenes, to make himself more attractive as the 2020 candidate, he was unofficially making it known that he would be a one-termer. According to The Hill, which was asking about this just this past June,

[T]he report most cited by those who believe a one-term promise was in place was from Politico in December 2019. “Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term,” reported Ryan Lizza. “While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.”

Lizza would go on to quote “four people who regularly talk to Biden” who said “it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024.” One “prominent adviser to the campaign” said explicitly, “he won’t be running for reelection.” That same advisor said that by signaling this one-term run, it would make the candidate a “good transition figure.”

That “transition” line is important, because it’s one Biden himself used publicly and on the record. “I view myself as a transition candidate,” Biden said at an online fundraiser in April 2020. In March of that year, at a rally where his eventual VP pick Kamala Harris was by his side, he used similar language: “I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.”

As we now know, that turned into a bridge to nowhere. By March 2021, Biden was saying something entirely different. “My plan is to run for reelection. That’s my expectation,” he said shortly after he was inaugurated.

Well, this is the Joe Biden we've come to know, manifested most recently in his pledge not to pardon Hunter. But the question is still why powerful figures like Obama snd Pelosi allowed this to happen. After all, if Obama, Pelosi, and Harris could show Joe the door last June, they could just as well have done it a year earlier. They could have organized a donor strike in 2023 as easily as in 2024, for instance.

Barring other developments, I'll speculate about this tomorrow.