In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Back in 1973, when Spiro Agnew resigned as vice president in the midst of the growing Watergate crisis, I read a commentator who predicted Angew's resignation would be "the first shoe of a two-shoe drop". I think we're looking at a similar situation now. We're beginning to see congressional Democrats calling for Biden to be replaced as the party's presidential candidate in November, but little is being said about what that means -- except that, as one panelist said on Fox he other day, "We all know what it means to recognize we have to take grandpa's car keys away. But what if grandpa is the commander in chief?" The New York Post gets closer to the point when it says, " There’s no way to restore the illusion that Biden is fit for the presidency ", but it never quite follows up with the next step, and it never says directly that he needs to resign. Jamie Barnett, an Obama liberal, goes there in an op-ed at The Hill: President...

Two big items turned up in yesterday's news that tell me last week's debate wasn't all that much of a game changer for the election. The first was Politico's report of a call from Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to Jen O'Malley Dixon , Joe's campaign chair: She used the call to reiterate her commitment and willingness to help the president but also voiced her concern about how much more difficult the campaign would be now for Biden, I’m told by a person familiar with the call. Even more revealing is how word of the call reached me: from someone close to a potential 2028 Whitmer rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. This person said Whitmer had phoned O’Malley Dillon with more of an unambiguous SOS: to relay that Michigan, in the wake of the debate, was no longer winnable for Biden. Whitmer herself has walked back the SOS attributed to her that Michigan is no longer in play, but it rings true to me. First, she says she won't be a can...

There are two aspects to the current crisis. The first, which strikes me as unreaistic, is just about what the Democrats should do with Joe as the nominee, when no course of action is very good -- his potential replacements would likely lose bigger than Joe if he stays on the ticket. The second, which is what actually has people nervous, is that Joe is commander in chief, but he's generally acknowledged not to be available for the proverbial 3 AM phone call : The time of day is important as to which of the two Bidens will appear. From 10am to 4pm, Biden is dependably engaged — and many of his public events in front of cameras are held within those hours. Outside of that time range or while traveling abroad, Biden is more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued, aides told Axios. And that's apparently from insiders putting the best possible face on things. Again according to Axios , which has had the most insightful current reporting from the White Hous...

Tryng to make sense of the current crisis, I've looked at two 20th century constitutional crises, the 1936 UK crisis that led to Edward VIII's abdication, and the 1944 crisis of FDR's perilous state of health leading into the November election and his death the following year only months after his inauguration. Both were resolved largely behind the scenes. But I think a closer and more recent parallel is the problem that was posed by Thomas Eagleton, who was the 1972 Democrat vice presidential nominee who was forced to withdraw his candicacy when information surfaced about his medical history. George McGovern's nomination for president at the 1972 Democrat convention wasn't assured, and his chances against Nixon in November were never bright. Thomas Eagleton, a US senator from Missouri, wasn't on McGovern's short list for vice president, but after Ted Kennedy and Abraham Ribicoff both turned him down, he had to find a willing substitute quickly. He fell ...

Let's delve a little farther into the 25th Amendment, or at least the part that's most applicable to the current crisis, Section 4: Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President. Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law p...

Back on June 7, I posted about the unspoken constitutional crisis during FDR's third term in which the White House, according to Dr Steven Lomazow, concealed the president's metastasized cancer and severe cardiopulmonary disease that made his death inevitable early in his fourth term. Enough insiders anticipated this that they forced him to drop Henry Wallace and choose Harry Truman as his running mate for the 1944 election. I said in that post, [I]t was a de facto constitutional crisis that under the circumstances could only be resolved by Roosevelt's death, which insiders fully understood to be imminent in any case. It's hard to avoid thinking we're heading for an equivalent crisis before the next election, but the additional complication is Vice President Harris. . . . Biden is bad enough, but it's less and less likely he can last another four years, and we'd get Harris sooner than anyone expects. By at least his final year in office, accor...

I was originally going to post on Nate Silver's Substack yesterday, The presidential election isn't a toss-up , and I'll have a few things to say farther down, but I actually think it's been overtaken by events, namely this morning's Qunnipiac and New York Times/Siena polls . The Quinnipiac has Trump up 6 points over Biden in a 5-way matchup, while the Times/Siena poll has Trump up 3. Between them, they put Trump up 2.6 points in the Real Clear Politics 5-way aggregate, 1.5 points in the head-to-head aggregate, when only last week, the head-to-head had him up by only 0.5 points. Although as I've been saying all along, the national polls are meaningless, because the popular vote doesn't elect the president, I think the movement in those polls over June does mean something. Quinnipiac minimizes it : As President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump prepare to face off in the first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, Trump has a s...