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Ocasio-Cortez endorses Biden's reelection campaign, sending a strong signal of Democratic unity
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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politics
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Pretty much the only negative for Biden is age, but that is a pretty big negative.
The campaign needs to see to make Kamala Harris digestible. More than with most campaigns, the way she is viewed is immensely important due to Biden seemingly able to keel over at any moment.
They could also replace her.
In fact there's a pretty good argument that they ought to pick their strongest 2028 candidate - which is almost certainly not Harris - and Biden should secretly promise that person that he'll resign after the midterms in order to get them to agree to join the ticket; the odds are pretty strong he doesn't make it through 4 years anyway, and this way there'd be a solid plan in place when he finally runs into whatever medical setback forces him out.
They'll avoid the problem in favor of short term benefit. Any belief I had that the Democratic insiders had a long-term masterplan went out the window with how little they've done to pump up Harris. I don't even want her to be an eventual nominee, but I thought they'd be purposefully building her as the trusted heir apparent. Instead they just dumped no-win issues on her while making her mostly invisible in the administration's wins.
That sounds like what happened to every vice president we've had in my lifetime. And that's close to 6 decades now.
Yeah, but there's a real difference when that VP is a Joe Biden or Dick Cheney who didn't really have an expectation to be the heir apparent, and when the president is old enough that not finishing a term is a real possibility. There's an uncomfortably high (though still low) chance Biden actually has to be replaced on the campaign trail, and while that's never a good thing, it's a lot worse when you've saddled your VP with tasks like solving immigration and getting voting rights passed when she never really had the power to do either of those things. "Eats shit on tough issues so the president doesn't have to" is a valuable service from a VP, but not if you want people to be ready to accept her at any moment as a drop in replacement.
So you're trying to talk about two different things and joining them together. On one hand being the heir apparent, and on the other having the president keel over.
Biden was absolutely the heir apparent. If his son hadn't died he would have ran, and our country may have been on a much different course than it's been for the past 6 years. For many of us, the idea of Cheney becoming president because of health reasons was pretty damn scary. For both bush terms!
Speaking of heir apparent, George Sr was definitely not considered qualified to follow in Reagan's footsteps. He actually called Reagan's policies voodoo economics.
In any case, if the president did have to step down hypothetically in 2 years, Kamala Harris is not going to appear any dumber than any of the other VP s we've had in my lifetime. She would be a placeholder until the next election, just like any of the others would have been.
They're intimately related because keeling over can happen in close proximity to an election. I never viewed Biden as heir apparent for Obama, maybe others did, but it didn't matter because there were plenty of other choices and he'd still have a full primary cycle to be tested and discarded if he ate too much shit to be elected. I'm not even sure he would have beaten Clinton if he ran.
If Biden keels over 1 year from now, we're in deep shit, and his chances of doing so are MUCH higher than other recent presidents. Pretending that Biden has the same negligible risk of leaving office early as any other president is the whole problem with their approach.
Kamala Harris has done exactly what a Vice President is supposed to do, but she isn't going to be President after Biden, at least not yet.
If that's the biggest negative, that's not so bad compared to all the other possibilities.
Not only is he old, but he's pretending that doesn't matter. I think that's pretty disingenuous.