Trying to make sense of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race and deification of Vice President Kamala Harris into the pantheon of great Democratic leaders, I reached out to someone on the inside and got back the following email.
“I am flattered that you think I know more than Morning Joe, even if the networks didn’t trust him to mutter homilies in the wake of the Trump shooting and pulled him off the air, lest he ask one of his guests: ‘Other than that, Mrs. Trump, what did you think of the rally?’
“No, I didn’t get a heads up from anyone in Rehoboth Beach that Joe Biden would be falling on his sword (although he’s been off his pins for several years), but the die were cast when George Clooney mailed off his nastygram to the New York Times to make the point that Joe failed to show the proper obeisance to the $30 million that all those Hollywood A-listers dropped into his lid. Money, after all, has to mean something.
“Deep down, despite all the comparisons between Joe and a Second New Deal, the truth is that Biden isn’t the sharpest tack in Washington. Yeah, he got ahead in the Senate, but that was only because he was one of the few Democrats who would carry Republican water, and occasionally mix it with Kool-Aid.
“Look at the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, and all those pubic hairs sticking to cans of Coca-Cola. Everyone who has spent more time in D.C. than your average tourist on an open double-decker bus knew that Thomas was guilty of far worse crimes than his crude, pornographic banter with Anita Hill, but Biden (remember, he was head of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary who approved Thomas?) gave him a hall pass so that on another occasion the Republicans might ‘remember him’ at the office.
“Obama picked Biden to be his vice president only because he was a southern senator dressed up as an East Coast liberal, and Barry figured he needed the votes of white men in suits who saw nothing wrong with frolicking at the deep end of the secretarial pool. “As vice president, Biden had one job, which was to sing lullabies to anyone losing sleep over the fear that Obama might come for their Audis.
“Father Joe’s parish was all those wealthy Democrats who are worth millions, even billions, but who still become weepy over the warming climate, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and the syndicalist rights of the United Auto Workers (not that many donors are commuting to their hedge funds in an AMC Pacer). “To them, Biden made sure that not one corporate icon went to jail over the 2008 financial crisis (all that watered stock and underwater paper that Wall Street laid off on Uncle Sam courtesy of Barack and Joe).
“In turn, they rewarded him with the Democratic nomination in 2020 (even after he finished fourth and fifth in Iowa and New Hampshire) and sufficient funds to defeat Donald Trump, provided that Joe understood his new job was to make sure that the federal budget functioned as the lender of first resort—there to make sure that corporate backhanders be christened as dispensations of the American Rescue Plan Act or the Inflation Reduction Act (in which about $783 billion in easy money was re-branded as fiscal and monetary prudence).
“I know it’s vogue to imagine Joe as the next FDR, stitching together safety nets for those juggling on life’s high wires, but it makes more sense to think of Biden the Elder as a croupier or maybe a floor manager in the American Casino—overseeing the roulette wheels to make sure that the high rollers come away with more than complimentary drinks. “You name the problem—Ukraine, Gaza, the cost of insulin, etc.—and Biden threw money at the problem, although always first to his Democratic constituents. “For example, in Ukraine, he didn’t send Zelensky blank checks. Instead he allocated credits so that the U.S. government could buy the weaponry direct from American factories and always at the full retail (marked up?) prices. Ka-ching if you’re Lockheed or Raytheon.
“What went wrong with this Oval Office confidence game is that the Democratic rentier class began to get the feeling that their pit manager (Biden) was losing track of the chips, the house odds on the slots, or the combination to the office safe. “I doubt that the irony was lost on the casino owners (Barack Obama, the Clintons, Madame Speaker) that they gave the hatchet job to Danny Ocean (aka George Clooney) to tell Biden that his security badge was expiring and that his last candidate salary would be waiting for him at the window. “On the talk shows, the Democrats are all about ‘the will of the people’ and ‘inclusivity,’ but in the back rooms votes are counted like pieces of eight, and Biden was coming up short.
“Mind you, the same crowd now giving him the bum’s rush were a month ago ‘ridin with Biden’, but party politics are little more than mob rule, the reason the U.S. Constitution makes no room for them. “I am guessing that the party hierarchs figured that they could beat the serially- indicted Trump with Biden or even one of those inflatable dolls people used to blow up and put next to them in the front seat, when driving through a rough section of town.
“Then at the debate, even when Trump held a long conversation with himself (“sharks…shower heads…and the late, great Hannibal Lecter”), he still seemed more with it than Joe (no small achievement on Biden’s part). “Biden wasn’t relieved of his command for political reasons akin to some argument in The Federalist Papers; he was run out of town for putting the Democratic capital account at risk, much the way auto execs with sluggish sales numbers are given the boot. “So what does Kamala Harris bring to this wheel of fortune? Not a lot, sadly.
“For the moment, as she’s in the midst of a coronation (think of the applause meter on the 1950-60s game show, Queen for a Day), she has the winning look of a monarch waving from the balcony. “But who knows if she can prevail in a campaign based largely on a letter of reference from the Clintons and all those temper tantrums to the effect that if she’s not given the nomination, she’ll take 100% of the black vote in 2024 and deliver it to Brother West’s Upper West Side revivalist tent, and swing the election to the Trump’s Hole-in-the Condo Gang. In politics, this is know as a ‘moral position’. “Can Harris beat Trump? I cannot quite see it, despite all the staff-doctored polls showing her even with him in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
“Trump is clearly psychotic, delusional, and criminally corrupt in everything he has done from porn-star accounting to trying to hang Mike Pence, but he’s not running in November as a political figure—with arcane views about the gold standard or Quemoy and Matsu.
“Trump isn’t running for anything: he’s choreographing a coup, but instead of seizing the radio station or nationalizing the copper industry, he’s appearing in a one-man Gilbert-and-Sullivan musical that has the implausible storyline of a failed hotelier and small-time racketeer taking over the free world. Except outside his venues, the posters announce: ‘BASED ON AN ACTUAL TRUE STORY – IT REALLY HAPPENED.’
“Now for Kamala Harris to show up at intermission and complain about the libretto makes about as much sense as someone fact-checking Evita to ascertain whether Eva Perón ever did sing, ‘Don’t cry for me, Argentina.’
“It misses the point that everything in Trump’s dark underworld is cleaned up in post-production, so you come away with the impression that he might be normal (which, I assure you, he is not).
“Normal isn’t groping and violating more than twenty women, defrauding the investors and lenders in a string of public and private companies, conspiring to overturn an election with goons and fake electors, or stealing state secrets and hiding them in a country club locker room.
“To me, the Harris campaign will evolve into one long shout into the Donald Trump void, Kamala as the fact-checker-in-chief.
Matthew Stevenson is the author of many books, including Reading the Rails, Appalachia Spring, andThe Revolution as a Dinner Party, about China throughout its turbulent twentieth century. His most recent books are Biking with Bismarck and Our Man in Iran. Out now: Donald Trump’s Circus Maximus and Joe Biden’s Excellent Adventure, about the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Source: CounterPunch
