Rich Lowry of National Review Online explores the Democratic Party’s divisions about the president’s future.
On the one side is the faction that wants to dump the presidential candidate chosen by more than 14 million Democratic-primary voters.
On the other side is the faction that wants to keep the presidential candidate who almost certainly will not serve out his four-year term, leading to the ascension of an unelected president and unelected vice president.
What the entire party agrees on is that, either way, it is supposedly defending democracy.
There’s no doubt that Joe Biden is the democratically selected presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, but also little doubt that his condition was hidden from the public and that, if he had to run in a free and fair nomination contest today, he would lose handily.
An increasingly feeble President Biden was a crisis waiting to happen, and now that the crisis is upon us, there’s no easy way out.
A pejorative but accurate description of the campaign to get Biden to quit the race is that it is an attempted intraparty coup. The voters chose Biden knowing that he was 81 years old, although the party apparatus did everything possible to deny them a choice between the incumbent and a plausible alternative and everything possible to shut down the little-known member of the House who mounted a sacrificial challenge. (If there had been a prime-time primary debate between Biden and Representative Dean Phillips, Democrats might not have been so shocked at Biden’s poor performance against Donald Trump.)
Still, for donors, pundits, and elected Democrats to attempt to undo this choice is frankly undemocratic. It looks even less democratic when it is factored in that a small handful of people — Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, James Clyburn, and a couple of others — are the ones who have the true power to perhaps force Biden from the race.
