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It took 24 days from President Biden’s befuddled debate performance to persuade him to surrender the job he’s been working toward for more than five decades. It may have felt like months, but history will record that the Democratic Party made a dramatic course correction in rapid time.
The Democrats had been drifting slowly toward disaster for two years, paralyzed by an inability to organize an alternative to Biden, whose abilities had obviously declined since his election (when he was a slower but still-recognizable version of his vice-presidential persona).
Gleeful Republicans seized upon the dysfunction, which seemed to mitigate the humiliation they felt over Donald Trump’s takeover of their party. You see, they sneered, we are not so different after all. Republicans were not alone in their helplessness.
But the Democrats, contrary to Will Rogers’s famous quip, turn out to be an organized political party, after all. And Biden turns out to be a very different man from Trump — not only in his respect for democratic norms and basic human decency but in his willingness to subsume his personal goals for the greater good. He has an ego, yes, but it is bounded. And he is willing to surrender power rather than tear down the Republic to hold onto it.
At the same time that the Democratic Party was loudly organizing a campaign to persuade Biden to step down, it was quietly assessing its alternatives. That apparent choice is Vice-President Kamala Harris. The evolution in her appraisal over the past three and a half weeks has been subtle, and much quieter than the public effort to un-draft Biden, but revealing. A party that once had little confidence in her political abilities now regards them with optimism (if not quite confidence).
My assessment of Harris’s political skills has also risen during this period.
For a time in 2019, I thought Harris might be the Democrats’ best nominee. That time was short and unhappy. Harris’s campaign was a misery, beset by disorganization and fundamentally misguided strategy: She was trying to appease progressive activist groups that commanded a much smaller percentage of the party’s actual voting base than most candidates and journalists understood at the time. She forfeited her primary biographical advantage, as a tough prosecutor, in a failed effort to chase what turned out to be a minuscule pool of voters and ceded the ground she had once inhabited to Biden, who won the nomination by staying in the same place he had stood since his vice-presidency.
Her performance as vice-president won few raves. But the job of a vice-president is difficult to measure. It is mostly rumors and vibes.
Since Biden’s debate, Harris’s words have attracted Talmudic levels of scrutiny. She has navigated an extremely difficult situation deftly — simultaneously previewing the messages she would use if nominated without giving the faintest whiff of disloyalty. That itself is a feat of discipline many politicians could have failed. Her rhetoric during this period has been relentlessly strategic. She is hitting Trump over his threat to abortion rights, his radical plutocratic agenda, and his criminality.
The rumors around Harris’s possible selections for a running mate have also been promising. The three names that have circulated are Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and Andy Beshear of Kentucky — the three most moderate governors in the party.
What this leak indicates is that Harris understands the assignment. She is no longer running for the approval of the California Democratic Party or the left-wing NGO apparatus. Her fate will rise and fall almost entirely on the question of whether she can convince a few hundred thousand voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and Lincoln, Nebraska, that she is not too liberal.
That’s the job. Enthusiasm of the base? Not a problem. The base consists of people who vote for you every time, and they’re ecstatic. Raising money? She’s going to need a bigger bank account.
All at once, the Democratic Party has roused itself from the torpor that has defined its mood for the last year and risen to the task before it. The members of the party will not just surrender to the inevitability of a mentally disordered aspiring caudillo getting his hands on the world’s most powerful democratic government. They did not go gently into that good night.
Two years of drift and decay has disappeared instantly into a blinding light of hope.
The cop against the criminal. Let’s do this.
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