Democrats Are Making a Huge Mistake
5 min read
Yesterday, Joe Biden did the honorable thing, after weeks of denying that anything had to be done at all. His announcement took his party by surprise—and now, in haste, the Democrats are making a colossal error and ensuring that they will reap as little advantage from Biden’s decision as possible. The error is not the choice of Kamala Harris. It is the sudden rallying behind her, the torrent of endorsements, right after Biden’s self-removal. Biden’s senescence was only part of the party’s crisis. The other part was the impression that Democratic politics felt like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning. For 27 minutes, between the time Biden announced his withdrawal and the time he broke the seal on Harris endorsements by bestowing his, the contest felt thrillingly, bracingly wide-open. The Democrats should have kept it open all the way into the convention next month, in Chicago.
“The Democratic National Convention is not the time to litigate [Harris’s] ability to take over for Biden,” Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote yesterday, in a column headlined “Kamala or Bust.” “The time to do that was in 2020.” She is right about the second part. The urgency of defeating Donald Trump in 2020 convinced many Democrats that feisty internal debates about the direction of the party needed to be postponed, in favor of party unity. In those circumstances, neither Biden nor his running mate was granted the scrutiny they deserved; they were personifications of the desire for a third Obama term, and on that basis they received the party’s heartiest and most casual approval. Four years later, the pair were running on their record (a strong if unpopular economy, a somewhat muddled foreign policy) but still had not articulated a distinctive vision. The party should have demanded that vision in 2020, or indeed in 2016.
Candidates who do not develop articulated principles and coherent views end up campaigning on nothing at all, such as Harris’s now-famous babble about “faith in what can be, unburdened by what has been.” Most politicians lean on inane rhetoric of this sort early in their campaign: “Yes we can,” “A thousand points of light,” “MAGA” in all its forms. But at some point, it naturally gives way to the nitty-gritty of politics—unless the politician uttering it remains in a largely ceremonial role, such as the vice presidency, and never faces the stress of an election campaign. I would like to know whether Harris’s unburdened faith means that as president, she would equip Ukraine with long-range strike capabilities against targets in Russia, and whether she plans to knock down tariffs or build them up.
If a campaign launch is a candidate’s chance to show off his pearly smile, the primary is the candidate’s chance to show off that smile after he’s been slugged in the face a few times. And as in boxing, it’s better to take one’s practice hits from a sparring partner rather than from the defending champ who awaits you on fight night. Harris is now in danger of bypassing that jaw-hardening process, which the Democrats could have extended over a period of weeks, as other candidates sought to displace her—and, if they failed, showed that they might be vice-presidential material. The process would also, like a normal primary, have long-term salutary effects on the party, by showing which young talent looks likely to ripen into Democratic leadership.
A prolonged process would also confer strategic advantages. Normally a party commits to a platform and a ticket several months (or in the case of incumbents, years) before the election. My colleague Tim Alberta has described the Trump campaign’s meticulous planning for a Biden campaign. “Even the selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate,” Alberta writes, was “meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.” Now that Trump is committed to his path, the Democrats have an unusual chance to revise their strategy to neutralize Trump’s choices. “The Republican Party just spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe Biden,” Trump’s former adviser Stephen Miller said on Fox News yesterday, with a whiny and wounded sense that the Democrats had violated the bounds of fair play. And in some ways they have—but now that they are redrawing those boundaries mid-campaign, they may as well take full advantage of their opportunity. That means not providing Trump with a fixed target, and calibrating their selection process for maximum lethality for his campaign’s locked-in choices.
The other strategic advantage is attention. To get airtime yesterday, after Biden’s withdrawal, Trump would have had to get shot in his other ear. His whole political career has depended on the fascination, sometimes morbid, of the public, as he says unexpected and strange things. No individual American politician can match his ability, but collectively, with genuine competition compressed over the next few weeks, they can create a circus more able to transfix voters than a series of Trump rallies.
Harris herself seemed ready to avoid the error of premature anointment. She promised to “earn and win” her party’s nomination, without any apparent expectation that it would be locked up in a matter of hours. Barack Obama, the last strategically gifted politician in his party, also seemed ready to take advantage of competition. He said he expected the party “to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.” But now that option is slipping away. Biden had to go, and to replace him with almost any candidate born after the Korean War would have improved the Democrats’ chances. But the manner of that replacement presents (or presented—by the time I finished writing this, even Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia had fallen in line behind Harris) opportunities. The Democrats, as they say, never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
