Yesterday, Joe Biden dropped out of the Presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris.
My thoughts–in no particular order:
I love Joe Biden. He has been a transformational President– an incredibly consequential one. Much as I admired and supported Barack Obama, Biden–calling on a long career of public service, and political savvy deepened by experience–accomplished far more. His legacy will be both an important and a sterling one.
That said, he is old (younger than I am…but let’s not go there…) and his decline was becoming obvious. His continued campaigning allowed the MAGA cultists to focus public attention on that decline, rather than on the existential threat to America presented by Trump and his racist cult. They will now be deprived of that tactic.
One of the constant complaints I’ve heard about the Democratic campaign the past weeks has been that the party has failed to hammer home the multiple, significant accomplishments of the Biden administration. One consequence of yesterday’s announcement has been that it has introduced the ability of the pundits and Democratic officeholder to engage in a hagiography of sorts: people commenting on Biden’s decision have used his announcement that he is backing out as a cue to celebrate a Presidential term that has been truly transformational–and to remind the American public of the multiple accomplishments of that term.
That’s all to the good. But going forward–and assuming Kamala Harris will be the nominee–what I think we will see is, in a very real sense, a fascinating, contemporary replay of the Civil War. (Hopefully, with less bloodshed, although with MAGA, one never knows.)
Kamala Harris will pledge a continuation of Biden’s policies, and those policies are infinitely more popular than those of Project 2025, which–as someone has noted–poll like Ebola. But what MAGA will find intolerable is that Harris is female and Black, and–worse still–has a Jewish husband.
Let’s be honest: absolutely no one looks at Donald Trump, a self-engrossed ignoramus who knows nothing about government and cares about nothing but himself, and sees someone competent to occupy the Oval Office. What they see–and what the research amply confirms–is someone who gives them permission to hate out loud. MAGA is a racist cult. It is today’s Confederacy, today’s war on Black people. The only difference between the original Civil War and the one taking place today (aside from the lack of muskets and powder-horns or whatever the arms of the day looked like) is that brown people, gay people, Muslims, Jews–anyone who isn’t a fundamentalist White Christian–is now part of those “Others” that MAGA folks insist cannot be “real Americans.”
The replay of the Civil War will be a nod to the past. But Kamala Harris has been a prosecutor, and what will be a far more contemporary facet of the upcoming campaign will be the face-off between a Prosecutor and a convicted felon.
Prosecutors are charged with upholding and applying the rule of law. Those of us who are lawyers of any kind have been appalled by a series of rogue decisions by a Supreme Court dominated by justices appointed by Trump. That Court has discarded any pretense of following precedent, and for lawyers serving in government jobs–prosecutors and public defenders, counselors to government officials–the destructive effects of Trump’s judges on the legal system have been incredibly painful. The prospect of electing a convicted felon to the highest position in American government is unthinkable to anyone who understands the importance of equal justice under the law. As a former longtime prosecutor, Harris is in a position to emphasize just how unthinkable that prospect ought to be.
So–here we are. Democrats now will have a youthful, dynamic and highly intelligent candidate, versed in the law, who will represent a successful administration that has passed important and popular domestic legislation and internationally has secured worldwide respect. The Republican cult will remain in thrall to an elderly candidate who is an increasingly incoherent convicted felon who consistently reinforces his lack of both civility and sanity, and whose potential victory terrifies leaders of the world’s democracies.
Joe Biden may have saved America. He deserves our gratitude and undying respect.
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