Recently I was exposed to the theory that Joe Biden in his presidential ambitions is likely to, after winning the White House and serving a brief portion of his term, resign and turn it over to Vice President Harris.
My writer’s brain tried to sus out the detail of how this occurred to Biden and frankly I don’t have a malleable enough imagination to make it credibly work.
Biden has run for president before and in his previous excursions on the political presidential battlefields has been routed. To quote a jape from The Daily Show ‘You don’t need Ukraine to beat Joe Bide, Joe Biden will beat Joe Biden.’ But as they say in the financial commercials past performance doesn’t assure future performance. A reasonable expectation when Biden entered the race was that he was too centrist for the moment and as before would be beaten in the primary.
Given that it is hard to imagine that he launched a grueling campaign not only expecting to win but plotting to give it all away as well. And even if he had joined the fray with that intention his serious early defeats would have given him credible coverage to drop out and let the left have the field. No, I just can’t see him starting the campaign with the intention of winning it and then giving it away.
So, for this theory to hold water he would need to come to this conclusion after the campaign’s start. After South Carolina Joe’s momentum built and the candidacy that had been on life support became the monster that slew the opponents to its left. Now going from victory to victory Biden suddenly decides that he wants to win but give it to the woman who shived him in the first debate? Joe has wanted to be president for some time, he ran back in 1988 what event or turn of chance would prompt him to suddenly decide he didn’t really want it but wanted to win it for someone else?
No, the idea that he came up with this plot after the contest started doesn’t hold water either. Like the idea of reavers piloting ships from planet to planet in the Firefly universe I simply can’t envision the scene where this happens.
The truth of the matter is that Biden, who isn’t for defunding the police, isn’t for Medicare for All, isn’t for eliminating the filibuster, just isn’t that frightening and that to make him frightening one has to invoke stalking horses, Trojan horses, or Manchurian scenarios otherwise he is a fairly garden variety Democrat and compared to the insanity that is the Trump GOP that’s far from frightening.
