Not the Time For Trick Plays
For as long as I can remember, the Democrats—both the party and the pundit-and-commentary class—have had an unfortunate fascination, a weakness really, for magical-thinking schemes. Magic Bullets, somewhere between a Captain Kirk plan and playing to a theoretical referee. There’s always some “thing” thats going to happen and solve The Problem, so we don’t have to do anything. The Mueller report, the state criminal charges, hell, the Supreme Court is gonna decide in favor of Gore. Anything to avoid doing the actual work. And this usually comes as a late-in-the-day last-ditch effort to make up for not having done the work.
But this thing about swapping out Biden as the candiate really takes the cake.
This seems insane to me. I understand that I like Biden more than most people as far to the left as I am, but that’s not the point. This is a single-issue election: beat Trump. Everything else is commentary. The incumbent in American Presidential elections has a huge structural advantage, and Biden is literally the only guy whose ever beat Trump in an election. Seems like a slam dunk to me, no matter how many bad debates we have.
(Also, buried in the background noise is that neither of them did well in the debate. And the other guy has a pretty hard ceiling of support.)
And look, I get it, there’s stuff he’s doing you hate, there’s issues you disagree on. Me too! But I guarantee whatever issue those are, the game show host will be worse.
I heard a lot the last week that the Dems have this deep bench full of people who could take over as candiate. Great! The 2028 primaries start now. Get them out on the trail today stumping for the sleepy grandpa. Let ‘em show us how great a campaigner they’d be. Whoever makes this happen gets the next nomination. While we’re at it, let’s make sure to tell folks about what this administration has actually pulled off the last couple of years? Take the credit. The fact that there is anyone over the age of 3 who can grump with a straight face that Biden “is the worst president of my lifetime” is a catastrophic PR miss. That’s the work they skipped, and all the hypothetical candidates in the world aren’t going to counteract forgetting to tell anyone what you did.
I love a good trick play as much as the next person who knows what an “onside kick” is, but there’s no crazy stunt where we pull Zaphod Beeblebrox out of a hat and he wins the election for us. The next president is gonna be one of those two guys. Let’s focus on making sure, at the very least, the wrong one doesn’t get there, not daydreaming about fucking unicorns.
Programming Note: Icecano will be off next week. Regular service resumes on July 15th.