The best candidate for President is different than the best Presidential Candidate. Right Hillary?
I didn’t watch much of the debate and didn’t need to. Biden looked shockingly old, and brought the worst version of himself. Trump is an incoherent liar, and brought the best version of himself.
The calls for Biden to withdraw from the race came quickly. And they are just as ridiculous now as they have been for months. It’s not gonna happen. There are two problems.
Firstly, who would the nominee be? Every pundit is silent here. Because none of the other candidates match up better against Trump. Andrew Sullivan this week, “For the first time this year, we have a chance of keeping Trump out of the Oval Office with a new nominee from a younger generation. No, I don’t know who — except it obviously cannot be Kamala Harris…”
Ezra Klein was well ahead of the pack, asking for a new candidate months ago. But he went through a long list of alternatives, and they were all worse. Kamala Harris, Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore, Jared Polis, Gavin Newsom, Raphael Warnock, Josh Shapiro, Cory Booker, Ro Khanna, Pete Buttigieg, Gina Raimondo, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chris Murphy, Andy Beshear, J.B. Pritzker… do you think of any of them have a better shot of beating Trump? Of course not.
Every pundit is failing this basic test. Who would do better?
Secondly, this is a collective action problem. Collective action is hard. The Democrats would need to get rid of Biden, do it without generating animosity, find someone new, agree on someone new, line up behind this new person, get the machinery of the party working on their behalf, all without fracturing their own base. Good luck.
Do you remember the bitterness between team Hilary and team Sanders? Tell me how the convention will pick a new candidate without half the party being so angry at the choice they stay home on Election Day.
Let’s go back to 2016. Donald Trump was disliked by most of the GOP party, both in the elite and the base. As his support grew, it became apparent he might actually win the nomination by splintering the rest of the vote across multiple candidates. If some of those candidates had dropped out, Trump would have lost. But no candidate would voluntarily take the hit, as a group they couldn’t agree to do it, and Trump won. No one would bell the cat. In office it was the same. Every couple of months a new Senator, Rep, cabinet official, major media figure or such would turn on Trump. But far too late. And far too scattered. If at any point these cowards had stood together against Trump… but they didn’t and couldn’t.
Now the Democrats have the same problem. There is no way to coordinate the decision making.
It’s not gonna happen. Joe Biden is the candidate, and will stay the candidate. Add this to my list of 2024 predictions, no way he drops out.
It’s from Aesop’s Fables.
“In the story, a group of mice agree to attach a bell to a cat’s neck to warn of its approach in the future, but they fail to find a volunteer to perform the job. The term has become an idiom describing a group of persons, each agreeing to perform an impossibly difficult task under the misapprehension that someone else will be chosen to run the risks and endure the hardship of actual accomplishment.”
What does this expression mean?
“No one would bell the cat.”