We are stuck with the French phrase coup d’état because nothing else describes so well the sudden removal of an old ruler by secret manoeuvrings — and their replacement with a chosen successor who happens to be endowed with every possible virtue. Of course, Kamala Harris is not a dictator because she must still face a nationwide election. But secret manoeuvrings did make her the presidential candidate of her Democratic Party, a position that is also intended to be filled by primary elections up and down the country before delegates agree on the victor at the Party Convention.
Nor was her vice-presidency enough to secure her candidacy. Far from it, given the unpromising electoral record of that most peculiar office, not inaccurately described as “not worth a bucket of warm spit” by John Nance Garner, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president. In fact, in all of American history, only seven vice presidents were elected to the presidency (eight replaced a dead president). This reflects the habitual role of vice presidents: emphatically not presidents-in-waiting but rather politicos serving as symbolic figures who are selected to attract voters that the president cannot attract with his policies.
In Garner’s case, those voters were the good ol’ boys of Texas and the South who might not otherwise vote for a New York patrician who was also a liberal. In Biden’s case, those voters were women: so much so that he felt it necessary to announce the sex of his vice president without first selecting a plausible candidate. Indeed, Senator Elizabeth Warren initially thought she had secured the position, but Biden’s most important backer during his painful primary season — after losing badly in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, America’s most senior black politician, Rep. James Clyburn, came to the rescue — demanded that the woman should be black. For Biden, Harris was the obvious choice because she was still new in the Senate and had little power of her own.
Having chosen Harris, he then proceeded to ignore her, just as each president before him had ignored his own vice president, so that it was only very recently that Harris was given a definite task: to stop the embarrassing and politically disastrous immigrant flood at the border with Mexico, which had started when Trump’s rather effective control measures were revoked during the very first days of the Biden Presidency.
What ensued was also embarrassing: having been appointed the “Border Tsar”, Harris did not stay in Washington to re-activate the controls that had worked so well under Trump, but instead travelled to Guatemala to earnestly tell would-be immigrants: “Do not come! Do not come!” Yet nothing changed at the border, which continued to be swamped — until Biden reactivated Trump’s measures as the election was approaching, when the numbers duly fell.
This is why, only a short time ago, the very same outlets that are now filled with joyful enthusiasm for Harris featured the grave warnings of anxious Democratic gurus, whose editorials urged her swift replacement by Biden. Unsurprisingly, Biden ignored those suggestions. As his own physical strength waned, Harris gained a very important new role in the White House: the best possible reason to keep Biden in the White House.
What happened next could not possibly have occurred if there were not a single directing hand behind the scenes. Suddenly, the very same voices from Nancy Pelosi down, who had just told the American people that Biden was fit and ready to win in the upcoming elections and rule for four more years, said the very opposite: that Biden should immediately announce his withdrawal from the elections. Nor is it any mystery who pulled the switch: Barack Obama, the only American President of recent times who has continued to live in Washington DC after leaving the White House — and it is not for the Potomac river-fishing that he has stayed there.
With the Biden White House staffed by officials who had served Obama for eight years (Biden’s own followers from his decades in the Senate are all dead or retired), his former boss could control policy directly, as he certainly did via Robert Malley (now removed for a security violation), who enforced Obama’s injunction that the US should never strike back at Iran, not even if Iran attacked US troops in Iraq and Syria. But except for Iran, Obama was much more focused on politics than policy; and when he saw Biden faltering, and then outrightly falling in debating Trump, he started the process that would swiftly lead to Biden’s abandonment of his re-election campaign — even though he had no solution for the Kamala Harris problem.
Obama had definitely not wanted Harris in that position, fearing that she would come under attack for her San Francisco career launched by an older mayor who was also her romantic partner. After Biden had locked himself into his vice-presidential choice of a black woman, Obama proposed his former National Security Advisor, Susan Rice. But even the faithful Biden could not accept that: in his own eight vice-presidential years, Biden often tried to influence foreign policy only to be overruled by Obama’s appointees, who knew very much less than he did after his decades of attentive service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And none was more arrogant with him than Rice. And so, even faithful Biden would not accept her, which meant that Obama could ensure Biden’s withdrawal, but not his replacement with his own candidate.
So, what is the party left with? Because Kamala Harris did not win even one primary, and her vice-presidential role was more unremarkable than most, it is possible, just possible, that this week’s gathering will not unfold as a Chinese Communist Party Congress, and one or more delegates will call for a choice. And because there are in fact candidates ready and waiting among the Democratic governors, eight of them women, an open convention need not devolve into chaos or coup — but rather into a democratic election.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/