Dem
47
GOP
53
There are two people who are: (1) Biden administration insiders, and (2) potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates. Those two people, of course, are former VP Kamala Harris and former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
Those two people have access to polling and to advice that most people do not. In addition, they have very good political instincts, which is how they have gotten to where they are in the first place. And both of them have very clearly concluded that, in 2028, they are going to have to have a good answer to the question: "Why didn't you do anything when you knew Joe Biden had lost his fastball? And maybe even his curve, his slider, and his eephus pitch?" Perhaps other Democratic contenders will also have to face this question, but perhaps not. After all, Harris and Buttigieg interacted with Biden on a regular, sometimes daily, basis. Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) and Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), to take two examples, did not.
Harris has clearly been wrestling with this quite a bit, and she spent the past half-year writing a book. It is called 107 Days and was leaked in part late last week. In it, she says it was reckless for Democrats to leave the decision up to Joe Biden about whether he should seek reelection at his age (81). Harris writes: "On his worst day, [Biden] was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired. That's when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles."
Harris also implies other Democrats should have tried to stop Biden, but she doesn't explain how. Did she want a contested primary, with many entrants, in which he would have to prove himself in primary debates? If she really thought that, why didn't she file to run herself and challenge him, which would have opened the gate for many other candidates? Biden might have won, but he would have had to prove that he was up to it. She says now it was reckless to just let him run but when she had the chance to stop him, she didn't. Sounds like 20-20 hindsight.
Harris goes on to accuse Biden's staff of not being nice to her because they were afraid she would upstage him. She wrote that "My success was important for him. His team didn't get it." Once that came out, a bunch of Biden loyalists fired back, which led to a counter-volley from Harris loyalists, and so on and so forth.
Sometime soon, this Democrat-on-Democrat violence will subside. However, Harris is clearly running for president, and she's clearly settled on a narrative of JoeGate, one that was presumably workshopped with many advisors and focus groups. For our part, we think she's chosen a very unwise tack. First, she is taking no responsibility for what happened, and trying to pass the buck to anyone and everyone else. Voters don't like that. Second, she is kind of stabbing Biden in the back. Remember, this is the same Kamala Harris who slammed Biden, in the 2019 debates, for opposing school busing. Then, once she was a serious candidate for the #2 slot, she decided she wasn't that upset about it after all. The whole incident, back in 2019, made her look like a political chameleon of the worst sort. The new "take" on Biden's presidency feels similarly chameleon-like to us.
After the book excerpt leaked out, Buttigieg appeared on Meet the Press, and was asked for his views on the whole situation. He said:
He should not have run. And if he had made that decision sooner, we might have been better off. But it literally was his decision. Nobody else was able to make that decision. And now in front of us, we're confronted with the decisions that come next, whether that's inside of a political party or movement or as we're all weighing right now, in our own lives, as Americans, as a country. And that's where we've got to focus.
There's really no GOOD answer to this question, at least not for Harris and Buttigieg. But we are inclined to think that Buttigieg's answer threads the needle a fair bit better than Harris' does. (Z)