The ‘what should be’ never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be,’ there is only what is.
Lenny Bruce
Never in its 27 years of existence has the title of this column been more aptly applied. It is time for a Reality Check, folks.
Let me begin by saying, if the goal of most of the country is to keep it out of the hands of a criminal, racist, misogynistic lunatic game show host with the force of a Christo-Fascist Project 2025 movement behind him (read it), then President Joe Biden is your best bet. Maybe your second-best bet, but by no means as effective, is Vice President Kamala Harris. Every other fantasy posed by pundits, celebrities, and the whining liberal panic mob is doomed to failure. This is a political absolute. Period.
I understand that Biden shit the bed in that debate a couple of weeks ago, but I took a silver lining from the manic response to it, which has exploded into a phalanx of madness since, both in print, on the airwaves, and especially on that regurgitating treadmill of bile: Twitter. It appears the supposed “Democratic enthusiasm gap” is a myth. People freaking out for two-plus weeks for the president to “get out of the race for someone else” in an avalanche of the craziest, surrealistic, and ill-conceived plots known to modern political thought proves that people really want to beat Trump – a lot of people. People who heretofore had been on the sidelines doing lord-knows-what.
These people will be there in November for Biden. Trust me. People this nutty are not going to not vote for the president because he’s old or might not finish a second term or isn’t the sexy candidate they want. They will do it like they did in 2020, to stop the psycho. My theory of the Empty Gatorade Bottle is strong. Keep it in your heart. Learn it. Rinse and repeat.
This is true of Independents, of which I am one. That 19% that ran from even considering Trump since his 34 felony convictions, is not easing back to him because Biden has a stutter or forgets names. This changes none of that. This has always been about Donald Trump. Either you vote for him and open the United States to an assault on its very foundation or not; everything else is a distraction. Getting into these hypothetical piss fights is only shifting the attention to peripheral nonsense, like complaining about the rain during the massacre at Gettysburg. The goal has not changed, no matter who is on the other side: Trump is an existential threat to our democracy.
Also, it is important to point out that the hair-on-fire brigade needs to come to grips with the lateness in which they proffer these fantasy-football-like notions of pulling in the always enticing and mysterious “someone else” from the maw of their fertile if not skewed imaginations. That time has passed, and whether it is because the Party saw fit to stick with their unpopular incumbent or just the normal political respect shown for the sitting president to try for a second term (especially one who had the best mid-terms as any since I’ve been on the planet, and that’s over six decades), there was a primary. And Biden got nearly 90% of those votes – millions of votes. And those voters have heard for years how Trump and the Republicans don’t care about democratic norms or the sanctity of the vote or the primacy of the voter – and they are right, they don’t, 2020 proved that. You do not want to alienate those voters – that would be far more damaging to the chances of beating Trump than people not loving Biden and desiring someone fiercer to bash a lying sack of feces every time he opens his rancid yapper.
That is the crux of this: people never really loved Biden. He is this generations’ Richard Nixon – not in comportment, moral turpitude or ideology – but that he is an avatar for the “against.” Republicans didn’t want Nixon in 1960, 1968 or 1972, but he hung around and won. (He likely won in 1960, but lest we digress, I shall move on.) He routinely had low approval ratings and there was never a groundswell of excitement around him, but conservatives were afraid of hippies and Blacks and kids burning draft cards and Commies and women burning bras, so they voted for him anyway. Fear is the great equalizer in elections. Biden is the bulwark, the cudgel to keep the barbarians from the front door and that has not changed at all since late June.
You can see it in the polls! The polls have moved maybe one to two points to Trump for now, which has been static for months – two points either way. Even that movement has begun to subside. Moreover, Biden has put Arizona and Georgia back in play (within the margin of error) in the last two months – two states I thought were lost to him in April. There are still a ton of “undecided” voters out there, many whom are staying on the sidelines and keeping Biden at 44-45% because they are hoping for that “someone else” thing. Trump is in his usual 45-47% range. I believe the vast majority of those wavering will come home when this braying subsides and it is a binary choice between an old codger the architect of January 6, who has been convicted of massive business and campaign fraud, and sexual assault.
What has also not changed since late June is Biden’s incumbency, which is a huge part of this. The mysterious “someone else” has no record, and Biden’s record is good – economic (while I write this, we have another record high in the DOW and inflation was down again in May), foreign policy, and non-wacky daily craziness of the last administration. People prefer calm over bedlam. They may want cheaper eggs but not 10% tariffs and using the Comstock Act to prevent abortion pills from being shipped interstate (both on Trump’s agenda). Status quo appeals to a great many voters historically, which is why the only alternative – if you must go down that wild card road –is Kamala Harris.
If it is not Harris, you lose the most loyal and important voting block of either party: Black women. You cannot just push Harris aside and shove in a young governor. Plus, Harris, as mentioned, technically carries with her the incumbency tag. As recently as George W. Bush, who was, let’s face it, over his head and a gaff machine that would make both Trump and Biden look like scholars, won a second term on “stay the course,” despite shitty approvals and two badly orchestrated wars in which American lives were lost. Also, Harris gets to keep most if not all the money the Biden Campaign has pulled in – including a whopping $34 million the week after the crappy debate performance. I always say, follow the money, ignore the blather.
Harris would trample the barely coherent, rambling lie-machine in a debate, sure, but she is still an unknown. She did not get 80-million-plus votes in 2020 or have an historically great midterms, but she can claim that staying the course is preferable to what looks to be a rather dark and chaotic alternative should Trump get in and fill the government with his gangster cronies who only pass loyalty tests and pull out of NATO, handing Eastern Europe to Putin and the Russians on a silver platter in a Chamberlain-esque appeasement-fest.
Harris is also on the ballot in all the states, much of which have passed deadlines for getting on, which, if mystery candidates emerge, will cause lawsuits that will be tied up in courts until after November 5 and keep them off the ballot. The court route has been an unmitigated disaster in stopping Trump thus far, also an avenue I have been saying for years is a dead-end fantasy that the panic-mob insisted would work.
Now these same people want to blow this thing up, as if this was a backup quarterback scenario. Put anyone else in, force a contested convention, let the electors vote their conscience, and turn this into the kind of circus that handed the White House over to Nixon in ‘68 for a grim six years before he resigned in shame covered in massive federal crimes that the supposed “conservative” Supreme Court now considers simply “the job of the executive branch.”
I get that everyone is scared, but while there are no atheists in fox holes, neither should there be feckless vacillators. We are in a fight. A true war for the soul of this nation. Donald Trump is a dangerous idiot. We have already seen what he did with the COVID crisis, how his leadership led to death and destruction. After January 6, the Republicans should have gone somewhere else, (Lenny’s “what-should be” versus “what is”), but they stuck with their guy. Time to do the same for his opponent: right now, the best one who can keep this pestilence out of the White House, Joe Biden. That is the job before us: win this election… or else. Not what happens in 2027. No one was thinking about the Marshall Plan when they were conceiving and enacting the D-Day Invasion. First things first.
Think this through: if for whatever reason, Biden can’t finish the next term, then the only viable alternative, Kamala Harris, will do it. She is on the goddamn ticket already. Simple as that.
Stay calm. Beat Trump.
