Even after the debate fiasco, Biden is still the best the Democrats have got

Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance will make little difference to how Americans see him. Even before his prime-time unravelling in Atlanta, more than 70 per cent of Americans had seen enough and didn’t want Biden to run again. His manifest unfitness for office does, however, allow the Democrats, their funders and their media chorus to discuss publicly what they’ve long known privately.

Say it isn’t Joe, then who will be the nominee in November? The Democratic National Committee has no good choices. Their names are Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom. Both of them smirked and praised Biden in the customary late-Roman style on Thursday night. Meanwhile, channels like CNN and MSNBC sharpened the daggers, explained why Biden should hang up his toga and fitted Newsom, the governor of California, for his coronation at the Democratic convention in Chicago in August.

Don’t believe it. If America were a monarchy, the White House would have announced a regency on Friday morning. But a President is harder to displace, even when he’s blatantly incapable like Joe Biden. There are three paths to sending Biden into the retirement he should have taken in 2016. None of them is straight. Each is blocked. And Kamala Harris awaits at the end of all three.

Option One is for the Congress to impeach Biden. This is not going to happen. The Republican-controlled House might prefer to leave Biden dangling than to let the Democrats off the hook. The Democratic-controlled Senate is hardly likely to admit its role as an accessory in misleading the American public about Biden’s fitness for office.

Option Two is for Congress to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Unfortunately, the Twenty-Fifth, which was added after the assassination of President Kennedy, specifies that in case of presidential “death, removal, resignation or incapacity”, the Vice President takes over. Republicans will relish a Trump vs. Harris race. For similar reasons, the party managers in the Democratic National Committee and major Democratic donors will dread it.

That leaves Option Three: begging the President to resign, then pushing through a new nominee in Chicago in August. Nothing suggests that Biden will consent to being fired. He says he “did well” on Thursday night, and Jill Biden reckons he did “such a great job”. And the First Lady isn’t gaga to think Joe can still win. He won in 2020 without campaigning. Donald Trump is now a “convicted felon”, and his lead in the swing states often polls within the margin of error. The media will fall in line.

If Biden resigns, Harris goes to Chicago as the first female and woman of colour President. Would the Democrats risk their first contested Convention as incumbents since Ted Kennedy’s run against Jimmy Carter in 1980? It would be a circus of racial resentment and class war. How would already wavering African American voters respond to a palace coup that installs a white male like Newsom?

Another alternative, Michigan’s governor Gretchen Whitmer, might swing her state back into the Democratic column, but again, the racial optics would be terrible. The Democratic coalition runs on the combustible fuel of identity politics. The DNC and the donors might prefer four years out of office to blowing up the party.

A President Harris would have the Democratic machine, the Justice Department and a begrudging media on her side. She would be the only obstacle to a second Trump term in an election that the Democrats frame as “democracy versus autocracy”.

Dire as her poll numbers now are, Harris might also appeal to a demographic that helped to assure Trump’s defeat in 2020, suburban white women. If the girl boss slays the handsy white ogre, Americans can escape the Grumpy Old Men reboot they’re currently trapped in.

It sounds like a fairy tale, but it’s really a nightmare. Kamala Harris is not a natural politician. Worse, she fails to play the part of one. Like Trump and Biden, her eminence is a symptom and a cause of America’s crisis of legitimacy. Unlike them, she has no record of achievement. The Harris presidency would be short, but it would still be catastrophic, and in unpredictable ways.

The Democrats may prefer to stick with the slow-motion disaster of the Biden presidency.