I hope Joe Biden spends the rest of the year driving his Corvette across the lawn at Trump Bedminster National Golf Club, doing donuts on the greens, spraying turf everywhere, and saying, “The Supreme Court says I have immunity, motherf-cker!”
If Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee — and I think it would be suicidal for the Democrats to turn this into an intra-party squabble, but I never doubt their ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — then I sure hope that Maya Rudolph has Saturday nights free on his schedule this fall. She’s going to be busy.
Lots of people are messaging me privately saying they don’t think Harris could win because of racism and misogyny. They said, “The Democrats should play it safe and pick a white, middle-aged guy, like Gavin Newsom.”
I have three deep thoughts on that subject.
The first deep thought is that bypassing the vice president is a terrible idea for a lot of reasons. It would alienate core Democratic voters — women and people of color — and also would allow the news media to focus on chaos and infighting. The Dems have already lost a month since Biden’s disastrous debate; instead of talking about Biden’s success stories (and he has been successful, despite what your elderly uncle posts on Facebook) the entire media narrative has been “Biden is frail.”
My second deep thought is that people who wouldn’t vote for a Black woman weren’t going to vote for Joe Biden anyway, simply because he’s a Democrat. There is no mythical bland Midwestern white guy who is going to be acceptable to Trump’s base. That well of potential voters is completely poisoned; they are utterly captured by Christian talk-radio, cable TV news and the vast right-wing bullshit machine, which is being ably assisted by billionaire technology companies funded by people such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen.
(If Biden’s administration is doing such a bad job, ask yourself this: Why are people such as Thiel, Musk and Andreessen spending billions of dollars to try to defeat him? Because the Biden Administration is finally enforcing anti-trust laws that have been on the books for decades, and they’re gearing up to come after the Internet monopolies.)
Deep thought 3: Democrats need to stop pandering to mythical white male Republicans who they think can be persuaded to vote for conservative Democrats, and start pandering to their own voters for a change.
The solid base of Trump dead-enders are not persuadable by any Democratic candidate. I talk to them; I listen to right-wing talk radio. Trump’s core supporters are firmly convinced that Democrats are pedophiles who drink the blood of infants and want to turn the United States into a Communist dictatorship with open borders and perform forced sex changes on kindergarten kids. The propaganda has worked on them.
On the other side, people who were going to vote for Joe Biden no matter what — even if the Democratic Party had to do a “Weekend at Bernie’s” on him — are not suddenly going to refuse to vote because Biden’s vice president is the nominee.
I suspect, however, that there is a vast middle ground of voters who were unenthusiastic about Joe Biden, or who weren’t closely paying attention because they figured 2024 was just going to be a rerun of 2020. Maybe that’s not a very large group of people. Maybe it’s only a few percentage points. But in an election that was going to be close, no matter what, a few percentage points could make the difference. I suspect they are much more “gettable” for the Democrats with a new, energetic candidate. If those votes are now in play, it’s hard to see that as bad news for the Dems.
But hey, what do I know? I thought the Edsel was a good idea.
Anyway, today is National Ice Cream Day. Joe Biden has had a crappy couple of weeks. I hope he’s enjoying some really good ice cream today.
And if Kamala Harris is looking for a bland middle-aged white male from Pennsylvania who will bring balance to the ticket, I’m tanned, rested and ready to serve as her vice president:
