There is no way Presidentish Joe Biden will drop out of the race, and I'm here to tell you today why he might.
Wait, what?
As regular viewers of Five O'Clock Somewhere* know, my friend and colleague Stephen Kruiser and I must have spent 18 months, maybe two years, disabusing people of any wild notion that Biden would pull an LBJ and drop out of the race or be somehow forced out by party insiders.
But recent news items have forced me to admit that the impossible is now merely highly unlikely.
For your consideration:
Ace of Spades: The Torricelli Option Is On the Table: Leftwing Bloomberg Begins Polling Trump v. Kamala Harris, Anticipating a Biden Departure. "Obviously, Trump thumps Kumala [sic]. But why even ask? What are they hearing?"
Hillsdale's Henry Olsen: Biden is denying reality – he’s losing this election. "If Trump holds his own [in the June 27 presidential debate], Biden’s low favorability suggests even a credible Biden performance won’t right the ship. If the polls still look this bad in early August, after a big debate and tens of millions more in spending, Biden must make a big decision."
PJ Media's Matt Margolis: WHOA! Trump Might Be Right About New York. "According to the latest Siena College poll, Biden still leads Trump in the Empire State, but his lead has dropped to single digits."
George Mason's Jeremy Mayer: How can Biden save America from Trump's return to the White House? Drop out of the race. "Biden has had, by most standard measures, a pretty successful presidency. But he’s being blamed for high inflation, the U.S. troops withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. A new face works better on intractable problems like the Middle East."
Even someone as deluded as Mayer is about Biden's so-called successes can see that he's in trouble. And when I showed Kruiser the "Torricelli Option" item, he replied to me, "I'll admit that his public behavior the last two weeks has me questioning whether he can even make it to the convention."
How might dumping Biden work in practice? I imagine it would go something like The Talk adult children must sometimes have with their elderly mom or dad when it's time for them to give up driving. Except that instead of a concerned son or daughter trying their best to break the news to dad gently, it would be a selection of overly ambitious hacks telling the guy with the nuclear codes that he's ruining everything for everybody.
Assuming, that is, that the cabal that actually runs the administration still lets Joe have the nuclear codes. I'm not sure how I feel about either possibility. But I digress.
The part I keep coming back to is the part that makes replacing Biden impossible: Alleged Vice President Kamala Harris. As Kruiser has pointed out so many times, the Democrats' 110% devotion to identity politics makes it virtually impossible to dump her — and yet she'd fare even worse against Trump than Biden would.
Or maybe Harris is more dump-able than we've thought. As Mark Hemingway asked earlier today after watching this hilarious (!!!) Daily Show sketch, "Is this even allowed? How did this happen and is a network exec getting fired over this?"
This Comedy Central Daily Show skit ripping Kamala Harris' word salads is both brutal and hilarious. pic.twitter.com/ODT5hc4Cf3
— Matt Wolking (@MattWolking) May 22, 2024
Just brutal. And previously unthinkable.
If the impossible is going to happen, it will likely happen shortly after the unlikely early June 27 presidential debate. I'll drunkblog the big event, of course, but it's the aftermath that might get everybody everywhere hoisting a few too many.
*Five O'Clock Somewhere is the longest-running and most popular VIP Gold video live chat anywhere in the Townhall digital empire.
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