The Dems Call for Backup
A fading Biden is out. Can a Kamala Harris Presidential campaign sprint to the finish and save democracy?
I’ve spent seven years as a political copywriting mercenary. I’ve been in some rooms and on Zooms with some powerful people. Broadly, those conversations are self-serving conch-passings where everybody’s angling to be the most powerful try-hard in the room — which means no one says much of anything worth listening to.
One Fall 2019 conversation on Capitol Hill caught my ear, though. As Congress returned from summer recess, a Washington insider informed me that if Joe Biden became president in 2020 (a bold prognostication back then, given the state of his fledgling campaign), he would not seek a second term.
The sense was that Biden was essentially “laying down on the tracks” to stop Donald Trump from ripping out the guardrails of democracy in a second term. Biden deeply believed he was “the only candidate” who could defeat Trump heads-up. Contemporaneous polls didn’t fully support this claim, but it was early and Biden had the requisite cachet inside the Beltway.
By February, Biden rescued his campaign in South Carolina. Fringe players dropped out and pledged their support. Finally, Super Tuesday issued a flood of Biden delegates, and the remaining…
