Required Reading

Michael Barone outlines the Democrats’ “nightmare scenario” for 2016, which he says isn’t likely but is possible:

It assumes, first of all, that Hillary Clinton is not the Democratic nominee, or that her poll numbers have gone sharply down (they’ve declined somewhat over the last year, and could conceivably fall more).

And it assumes that voters’ attitude toward the Obama administration remains roughly where it is today, with 44 percent job approval for the president.

At which point the Democratic Party has a serious problem. Like the Republican Party after it got crushed in 2006 and 2008, the Democratic Party, after its pounding in 2010 and only partial rebound in 2012, has very few plausible presidential candidates apart from Clinton.

Read the whole thing.

In choosing Joe Biden, Barack Obama in 2008 made a mistake similar to the one Bush made in 2000 by selecting Dick Cheney. Each presidential nominee was looking for someone to add gravitas to their ticket, which Bush certainly did and Obama certainly did not. But by choosing someone with essentially zero prospect for ever winning the White House somewhere down the road, each nominee shrank his party’s future prospects.

Joe Biden — two-time failed presidential wanna-be — brings virtually nothing to the table in 2016. Clinton has had a bit of the stench of scandal fatigue around her, and the smell seems likely to grow worse. But what might really hurt the Democrats “going forward” is a short list of just two items:

• Their tendency to fall in love with the shiniest, newest candidate.

• The likelihood that, with the progressives fully in charge of the party these days, that the shiniest, newest candidate is someone even further to the left than Professor Ditherton Wiggleroom.

I’m not discounting the Clinton political machine, which at this point still seems likely to secure Hillary the nomination. But “at this point” is a very temporary moment in time, and Benghazi and Bergdahl scandals may yet draw blood — leaving plenty of room for an Elizabeth Warren to slip right by Hillary the way Wiggleroom did in 2008.