Democrat soap opera is only just getting started
We were walking the dog in the evening sunshine when my phone pinged. Inveterate news addict that I am, I took it out of my pocket, saw the headline and exclaimed “He’s gone!”. My better three quarters stopped in her tracks, stared at me quizzically and, when I added “Biden’s gone!”, replied with a little annoyance: “Phew, I though you meant the dog”. And so it was that we began to wonder, now that we had got what we wanted and in many cases expected – I had on Friday night expressed my expectation that he would have stepped down before the weekend was over – where the soap opera of the Democrat presidential run would take us next.
Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die. It came as an inevitability that Sleepy Joe would endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor in the role of Presidential candidate although there are two things I know. The first is that, with Biden gone, there is nothing formally binding the delegates to his chosen replacement. Officially, the race is open. The second is that, for three and a half years, Vice President Harris has been treated as something of a joke, has carried miserable popularity ratings and had been regarded as having been selected in 2020 as Biden’s running mate more for her gender and ethnic background than for her political skills. From the beginning, sceptics had feared what might follow if Biden were in fact to fall off his perch and she were to inherit the Presidency. And now the party is to embrace her as the saviour of all things Democrat and to run the Donald a proper race.
As noted, there is nothing that states that she has to be selected to run on 5 November but, as we stand, just a month before the DNC meets in Chicago, the Democrats will struggle to find another credible candidate who will be prepared to be publicly ripped to shreds by the Trump/Vance campaign and, in the process, will possibly spoil their chances of running and winning in 2028.
The Democrats have leapt out of the frying pan into the fire. But it is they who put themselves into that metaphorical skillet, by clinging on to Joe Biden when most of the world acknowledged that he was not up to a second term.
This is not the time and place to go into the theories on demographics and party political loyalty but suffice to say that fascistoid tendencies are assumed to thrive in an upper working class and lower middle class environment where, in the mid-21st century, socially conservative ethnic minorities are well established. Despite being mixed-race, or a woman of colour as it is had in modern parlance, Harris cannot, as a West Coast progressive, blindly rely on the minority vote.
On the contrary, amongst the largely catholic Latinos, the legally settled ones with American passports and the right to vote, the Trump message plays pretty strongly. This is a newish phenomenon and one that was going to be tested on 5 November, irrespective of who was representing either the blue or the red corner. The pack is being re-shuffled and it would take a brave man to forecast the actual outcome. That said, if I were to have already placed a bet on a Trump victory, I would still probably let it run.
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