Joe Biden is no longer the Democratic presidential nominee.
After weeks of heartburn from the Democratic political establishment -- and the unique spectacle of the media finally holding the Democrats accountable for their dishonesty -- Biden announced this week that he would be dropping out of the presidential race. That announcement followed his disastrous debate performance against Donald J. Trump, a performance that demonstrated to a flabbergasted America that the president of the United States is fully addled. Biden tried to deny it for weeks; some played along; most did not. Eventually, Biden's abysmal poll numbers, combined with strong-arm tactics from political mafia boss Barack Obama and consigliere Nancy Pelosi, forced Biden from the race.
There are a number of lessons to be learned from this extraordinary chain of events.
First, as Lincoln apocryphally said, you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. For years, we were told that behind closed doors, Joe Biden was cracking the secrets of cold fusion, even as we saw with our own eyes that he was in a state of continuous mental collapse. The power of the media only extends so far.
Second, while the political parties have lost much of their former power, they still exist -- and they still have teeth. Democratic Party bosses and money men tossed out 14 million votes in favor of Joe Biden in the primaries because the polls looked bad. It's that simple. Biden didn't drop out because he suddenly discovered that as a patriot, he simply couldn't lead America forward any longer. He dropped out because it was made clear to him that either his political brains or his signature would be on his resignation papers.
Third, the Democratic Party still has a few unbreakable rules, the most important of which is that no Black woman can be supplanted, no matter how bad a candidate she is. The newfound Democratic enthusiasm for hideously unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris has odor but no substance. Few Democrats are excited about Harris; they're more excited that Biden is gone. But Harris herself is a preternaturally flawed candidate: corrupt, radical and dishonest. She ran an all-time stinker of a presidential campaign in 2020; during that campaign, she somehow achieved the signal political feat of coming out against fracking, guns and private health insurance -- sure winners in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. As Biden's supposed "border czar," she has presided over the worst border crisis in American history; she is tied at the hip to his awful record. Then there's the fact that she is a charmless copy of Hillary Clinton, with the unfortunate addition of a Joker-like involuntary laugh that could break glass.
But Democrats can't get rid of her. To do so would be to crack their intersectional coalition. And since 2012, Democrats have been running on that coalition ... over and over and over again. It has only worked once, and that time only because Democrats radically changed every voting rule. But Democrats are wed to the strategy. And they won't divorce it now.
All of which means that Donald Trump still has the electoral advantage in 2024, should he choose to take advantage of it. He'll have to be more disciplined than he has been against a walking corpse like Biden; he'll have to focus on Harris' record rather than her unlikability or lack of qualifications. But anyone who proclaims that Harris' entrance into the race means that she is now the frontrunner simply isn't living in the world of reality.
In the meantime, we bid a not-so-fond farewell to the candidacy of Joe Biden. Now only one question remains: If he's too senile to run, why isn't he too senile to remain president for the next six months?