Jon Chait has a new article up at New York Magazine in his series of articles about Joe Biden and the need for him to end his candidacy to make way for a younger, more viable candidate. His main issue now is that the people in the Democratic Party who were pushing hardest to get Biden to step aside have, he says, simply given up and accepted losing the presidency. He then analogizes this move to the atmosphere after 9/11 in which Democrats rallied around George W. Bush as an act of national unity. He finds this perverse because there’s nothing about national unity that makes you suddenly accept the ascension of the primary driver of political violence and national chaos simply because that person became the target of violence.
I find myself disagreeing with most of these particular claims but agreeing with the overriding one: I recoil at the center of my being from Democrats’ tendency to just fold at the first, second and third sign of difficulty.
I don’t think what’s happening right now has any relationship at all to anything about 9/11 or the reaction to it. I think that’s a total misread of everything. A school shooter kid tried to shoot Trump and missed. That’s not an everything-changed moment. I don’t think we’re going to say “that’s pre-school shooter kid tried and failed to shoot Trump” thinking. I also don’t buy this idea that the biggest agitators for replacing Biden just went soft when someone shot at Trump because of national unity or something.
I think it was already slowing down because it was hitting a lot more resistance from regular voters than the people pushing it anticipated. When I saw the shooting I immediately thought the whole switch out Biden thing was going to grind to a screeching halt. That was because I thought it was already running out of energy because of things that were happening within the campaign and it seems crazy to think that you’re going to have one candidate get shot and then immediately have the other guy drop out. It’s at least going to freeze things for a few days. You’d at least wait until after the convention.
But here’s the thing. The folks talking to the Capitol Hill sheets didn’t say, we’re dropping the swap Biden idea. They apparently said, well, we’re giving up on presidential race altogether. That is just the kind of toxic loserdom that makes me see red every time. Can’t stand it. I’m agnostic on the replace Biden thing. If the big party players want to do it then do it. And if not then Biden’s the candidate. I go back and forth on which option I think has the better shot at success. What I’m hearing now is that these ringleaders are just going to take a pass on the whole race or have their contribution be giving demoralizing quotes to Politico if they can’t get their way. The truth is we don’t have any time for whining. If members of Congress want to replace Biden on the ticket, they can. They need to get together and do it. If not, then drop the idea and move on. But again there is just no damn time for whining.
I’m actually seeing people write articles comparing those raised fist images to the iconic flag raising on Iwo Jima or various paintings from the Revolutionary War or Christian iconography. A column ran today on The New York Times op-ed page in which the author explained that Saturday’s events convinced him that Trump was what Hegel described as a “man of destiny” on the model of Napoleon, a figure “whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World Spirit.”
JESUS CHRIST.
If you can’t take in this nonsense and say, nope, I’m going to head straight to Milwaukee and make the case against this dangerous degenerate, than you just need to resign or get out of the way and make room for someone who can. No complaining, no whining. Act.
