Way Too Many Unanswered Questions

There are too many unanswered questions about Joe Biden's presidential peregrinations: we saw yesterday, for instance, that Barack Obama prevailed on Joe not to run in 2016. Some sources claim that Obama had a private deal with Hillary that she would get the nomination that year, while yesterday's version was that Obama simply thought Joe wasn't up to it, especially after Beau's death. Certainly both could be true, and as information about Joe's true health after 2015 gradually leaks out, it seems entirely possible that Obama knew things we didn't. He was the president, after all.

We also know that after the June 2024 debate, Nancy Pelosi was able to force Joe to withdraw from the race. The reason must certainly be not that she or anyone else at that level was at all surprised by Joe's performance, but instead that the charade could no longer be maintained. This is just another way of saying that senior Democrats were forced to acknowledge what they'd known more or less since Joe's time as vice president, likely not that he was just soft in the head, but that he was sick with cancer and quite possibly Parkinson's as well.

Nor should we neglect, in the context of the latest revelations, the July 17, 2024 health episode that Joe allegedly suffered in Las Vegas, only days after the Butler assassination attempt on Trump. Snopes couldn't quite debunk this, despite trying:

In the months leading up to the November 2024 U.S. presidential election, an online rumor claimed U.S. President Joe Biden suffered a serious, undisclosed medical emergency during his stay in Las Vegas between July 15 and 17.

The timeline for this rumor began on July 17, when White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announced a COVID-19 diagnosis for Biden — the reason given for why the White House cut his trip short and canceled one of his planned speeches in Las Vegas.

Four days later, on July 21, Biden announced he would drop his reelection bid — a U.S. presidential decision not seen in decades.

. . . The rumor about Biden suffering an undisclosed medical emergency originated the following day — July 22 — on the X account for Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA. Kirk's post featured mentions of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, the U.S. Secret Service, University Medical Center Southern Nevada and the White House.

By email we contacted Kirk and all four of the aforementioned organizations or institutions named in the post but did not receive any details in response within several hours. The Secret Service simply responded, "We refer you to White House communication for this query."

So, given that both Obama and Pelosi demonstrably had the veto power over a Joe Biden candidacy, why did they allow him to run in 2020, much less 2024? We know almost nothing about any decision making process on this issue, except that we're beginning to learn that as of 2023, contingency planning had begun for Biden's death in office:

Democratic officials staged “hush-hush talks” to plan for Joe Biden’s withdrawal as the party’s presidential nominee as early as 2023, says a new book.

Citing two unnamed sources, authors Jonathan Allen’s and Amie Parnes’s account [in Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House] adds another twist to the torturous saga over the then president’s age and fitness that was not resolved until a disastrous debate against Donald Trump precipitated his exit in July 2024.

More startlingly still, the book also reports that aides to Kamala Harris, the vice-president who assumed the nomination then lost to Trump, “strategized around the possibility that Biden might die in office”.

Such planning was led by Jamal Simmons, Harris’s White House communications director, Parnes and Allen report, and went as far as the drawing up of a “death-pool roster” of federal judges who might swear Harris in.

Simmons “never told the vice president about the death-pool roster before leaving her camp in January 2023,” the authors write, “but he advised colleagues that he should be notified immediately if something happened to Biden, because he had worked out an entire communications strategy. And he left the spreadsheet with another Harris aide.”

Nevertheless, even with these behind-the-scenes concerns, Biden was somehow able to convince the people who could have vetoed a 2024 candidacy that he should run, despite the fact that he'd sold himself to those same people in 2020 as a one-termer:

President Biden's insistence on staying in the 2024 race has seemingly defied his own pledge to serve as a transitional president to a younger generation of Democratic leaders.

. . . Biden's disastrous debate performance and his team's handling of the fallout have churned anxiety among Democrats and angered White House and campaign staff as questions swirl about whether he should step aside.

. . . Biden acknowledged during an interview with BET News that aired July 17 that he had originally run for president as a "transitional candidate" and that he had expected to "pass it on to somebody else."

What changed? A possible answer has been suggested by Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers in The Drill Down podcast:

As Schweizer and Eggers note, the Democratic hierarchy realized early in Biden’s term that Harris was inadequate and would lose to virtually any Republican candidate, let alone the juggernaut of another Trump candidacy.

Democrats had realized Biden “would have to run for a second term because of the fear that Harris could not win a race against Donald Trump or against any Republican,” Schweizer says. The authors of The Truce “write that ‘Democrat after Democrat we interviewed, including members of Biden and Harris’s own teams, said Kamala’s not ready for prime time. She ain’t ready for this.’ They also said she has a lack of discipline, lack of focus or decisiveness.”

Some, he notes, even called her a “shallow narcissist.”

“It’s crazy to think that among the legacies of the summer of BLM and George Floyd is that that’s what locks in Kamala Harris’s position as the vice-presidential nominee, even though Joe Biden wanted to go in a different direction,” says Eggers. “The sort of identity politics that they want to impose on the rest of us is what ends up really biting them in the end.”

Nevertheless, it was those same "centrist" party leaders who ensured that potential centrist candidates like Dean Phillips and Robert Kennedy Jr couldn't be put on enough primary ballots to challenge the 2024 Biden-Harris ticket. They were also able to veto even the prospect of a quasi-prmary process after Joe withdrew, settling on Harris as the consensus choice. And the cabal that was in charge was in fact fully prepared for Harris to succeed to the presidency should Joe be unable to continue:

Was Joe Biden really unaware that he had metastatic prostate cancer and unlikely to survive when his team announced his reelection?

Or is it more likely the plan was for Joe Biden to win in 2024, then reveal the cancer, step down and Kamala Harris would be installed.

The problem that cropped up in their ‘best laid plans’ was not the cancer in 2024, but rather the scale of the cognitive decline becoming more obvious…. and that led to a quick change in approach.

Everyone in DC knew.

No one in Washington DC did not know.

So several things had to change to bring us to the state of affairs in July 2024: Obama had to withdraw his 2016 opposition to Joe running in 2020. Then Obama-Pelosi had to decide it was OK for Joe to run again in 2024, when he'd originally sold himself on the basis he wouldn't -- and this against the backdrop of the certainty that he wouldn't live out a second term, if indeed he could even finish his first. They were finally forced to change their minds only when they had to give up the whole game -- but then, couldn't they also have forced Joe to step down as president and let Kamala succeed to the office before the convention? Why didn't they?

There are still too many questions.