Less than a half hour after President Biden announced on Twitter he was ending his White House bid he returned to Twitter to announce that he was endorsing Kamala Harris to be the nominee. She and everyone else in Democratic politics is going out of their way to stress that with Biden out of the race there will be an “orderly” and “transparent” process of choosing a new nominee. Harris, in her announcement, said she looks forward to “earning and winning” the nomination.
I think we can already see how this is likely to play out. Gretchen Whitmer has already announced that she won’t challenge Harris’s bid for the nomination. I strongly suspect that within the next 36 hours all the plausible challengers will do the same. So what you’re likely to see is a situation in which Harris is running for the nomination but all the conceivable challengers have confirmed they’re not running and have endorsed her. So whatever the nominal process, the opportunities for thunderdoming just aren’t there. In truth, all the same people will have their hands full in the subterranean campaign to be chosen as her vice presidential nominee.
From where I sit, there doesn’t seem to be any drama left even after a couple hours. The last month has been nonstop agony for Democrats. As time went on it wasn’t even one kind of agony. But each day new and different kinds of agony. Even people I know who were deeply against this happening now seem relieved to move past this period of paralysis. Once President Biden endorsed Harris all those agonized feelings rushed forward into a sense of relief and for many excitement. The odds of any politician with a promising future ahead of them wants to jump in front of this train and say, “No, it should be me, Joe” just seems vanishingly small.
