A Campaign Reset
Thank you, Mr. President.
Well alright then.
As I wrote last Tuesday, I didn’t expect Joe Biden to leave the race. No one knows what happens from here. This is unprecedented in the era of modern campaigning.
But I do have some thoughts and hunches to share. So here goes:
(1) There is still plenty of time.
American elections drag on for way too long. This has been one of my standard riffs when I speak to international audiences for years. Usually I retell a story about visiting Australia in May 2016 and talking to an activist group in Sydney. The national elections had just recently been declared. They had this big countdown clock on the wall, and were in all-hands-on-deck campaign-mode. They told me all about the long, grueling six-week process in front of them. “Six weeks!” I replied. “That’s so… civilized!”
There are 106 days from now until Election Day. That is still significantly longer than the electoral calendar of every other contemporary democracy on earth. This only feels rushed because we are living through it.
There will be plenty more campaign-defining beats between now and November 5th. The Democratic National Convention is still a month away. There will (likely) be a September debate. Donald Trump still might be sentenced for his 34 felony conviction. It is going to be an astoundingly long 106 days.
That time will be put to good use now. That’s what the campaign is for.
(2) That palpable sense of relief.
The lingering feeling of dread, ever since the debate, was that we would all be walking on eggshells through November, hoping that the candidate didn’t have another significant bad day. When I read the news of Biden’s announcement, that dread was gone. I felt ten pounds lighter. The sense of relief was palpable.
For what it’s worth, Joe Biden exceeded my expectations as a President. Especially on domestic policy, I believe that he has been a tremendously effective President. He passed multiple pieces of major legislation in a time when the government doesn’t really do big things anymore. He rebuilt the government’s capacity to actually govern. The Inflation Reduction Act alone may secure his place in history as an ultimately transformative President.
I supported him running for a second term because I believe his administration, on balance, has earned it. I also relished the rematch: Joe Biden already beat Donald Trump once. I figured he could do it a second time.
When he gave the State of the Union address, I was pretty optimistic. I wrote back in March, “Biden easily beats the expectations that have been set. The guy has been in politics for fifty years. He’s funny. He’s sharp. He isn’t as masterful of a rhetorician as his two Democratic predecessors. (…) But he isn’t being compared to them. He’s being compared to his own caricature.”
The caricature of Biden, as set forth by the Republicans and echoed by mainstream media outlets, is that he is elderly, frail, and lost. And as recently as the State of the Union, that was a bar that he easily cleared.
And then, last month at the debate, he didn’t clear it.
Since the debate, he has participated in dozens of interviews and public events. He has seemed better, but not better enough. He looks elderly. The Presidency ages everyone. With Obama, those aging effects read as comedy. With Biden, they read more as tragedy.
The effects of aging are uneven and irreversible. The outrage at elite Democrats for “hiding his condition” strikes me as entirely fake. He was fine, and then he wasn’t fine anymore.
I think he still could have won the election. But it was going to be extra-difficult when every potential misstep fits perfectly into the story your opponents are telling about you.
It will be easier to win now.
(3) Kamala Harris is, at this point, an ideal candidate.
She’s a prosecutor. Donald Trump is a convicted felon.
She’s a woman. Donald Trump’s hand-picked justices overturned Roe.
She’s the Vice President, so she can still run on the record of the incumbent administration. Donald Trump is the former President with a disastrous record, still in denial that he lost in 2020.
She exudes competence. He’s a bungling authoritarian.
And, while Donald Trump has united his party by driving out every last person who disagrees with him (Including every former President, every former Presidential nominee, and most of his former cabinet officials), Kamala Harris now has the overwhelming support of a pretty damn diverse coalition of actors within the party network.
If she had run in a long, grueling open primary, she would have had a lot more difficulty building that broad party support. (That’s just the way open primaries go. Biden and Obama and Kerry and Gore and Clinton all faced the same hurdles.)
But now, thanks to how the past three weeks have played out, there is overwhelming party support for her. Everyone stared at the absurd work-it-out-at-the-convention proposals and said “No. Absolutely not. There’s no time for this Sorkinesque nonsense. I am hereby coconut-pilled. I am living in the context of what came before.”
Joe Manchin is supposedly toying with challenging her at the convention. He’s a registered independent. He’ll have to re-join the party. That’s… cute. I’m sure the NoLabels folks will fundraise off it for 48 hours or so. But its such an obvious dead-end that it only further emphasizes that the whole actual party stands enthusiastically behind Vice President Kamala Harris.
(Marianne Williamson has plans for the convention as well. I think that’s great. Give the comedy writers some low-stakes material. Sort of an oasis in hard times.)
I believe Kamala Harris is going to win.
The party is excited and unified.
She is positioned to exploit every one of Trump’s glaring flaws.
Many of the attacks that Trump will use against her will backfire, revealing that the Republican Party is currently run by crooks and creeps who hate a lot of America and a lot of Americans.
Harris can run on the record of this administration, and remind voters why they were so eager to put an end to the Trump years.
And she’s a prosecutor. Think about what Donald Trump’s track record is against prosecutors.
This is a campaign reset. There’s still plenty of time. And the Democrats now have a winning story that they can confidently tell.
Let’s go.
I’m gratified that Gavin Newsome and many other prominent Democrats immediately endorsed Harris. She has the campaign funds and apparatus. I don’t see anyone else being able to run a successful campaign in the time remaining.
This whole thing has caused my mom (a regular voter but otherwise unengaged) to look into driving people to the polls. I hope that's part of a wider shift of the normies awakening.