Joe and Kamala

Created
Tue, 19/09/2023 - 00:30
Updated
Tue, 19/09/2023 - 00:30
Are there not enough real problems to fret over? Democrats should have learned from the 2016 presidential race not to underestimate the commitment of the Republican tribe to its presidential frontrunner. Savvier GOP play-ahs may be nervous about having Donald Trump and his indictments running atop their 2024 ticket, but from what Mitt Romney revealed last week, many, many of them are too afraid of their violence-prone MAGA base to openly oppose him/them. An emergent “existential brand of cowardice,” as McKay Coppins put it, permeates the party leadership. That is to say that Democrats should know better this time than to count on some deus ex machina to recast the race that seems already cast … for both parties. What was it Andy Dufresne said in Shawshank? But Democrats being Democrats, they will. One thing Democrats are good at is self-doubt. Slate’s David Faris suggests (obliquely) that they get busy instead. He finger-wags at murmurings about a second-term VP for Biden: “Maybe the president should dump the veep” is a Beltway parlor game as old as time. Or at least as old as the writers doing the speculating. There were calls for George H.W. Bush to replace Dan Quayle with Colin Powell in 1992, and gossip that George W. Bush would toss the gruff Dick Cheney overboard in 2004. Before the 2012 election, some thought that Barack Obama, reeling from his historic “sh ellacking” in the 2010 midterms, should eighty-six then–Vice President Biden and replace him with his 2008 rival,…