Xitter thread by Daniel:
What Obama probably grasps and others miss is what replacing Biden in these circumstances for THIS reason would mean.
He is President. If he cannot excercise the duties of a candidate he can’t exercise those of President . And if the party admits it, then it means they admit they lied.
This is not Biden deciding on his own he cannot do the job. This is other Democrats deciding he will lose because too many people found out.
It is bad enough for voters to suspect you lied. It is another to admit it. For over a year every major Democratic figure has come forward to gush about Biden’s cognitive abilities in private. To force him out now is to admit they were gaslighting the American people. Gaslighting them over the most important and consequential issue imaginable.
This is doubly true of any plan to displace Harris. To suggest that not only is Biden unfit to be President but so is Harris to succeed him is to admit that the Democratic elite for its own ends, installed a President and Vice President who are unfit for office. At a time of domestic and global crisis. Furthermore, that for the next seven months including the campaign, America will be governed by two individuals whose own party has repudiated as competent for their roles, all because the voters trusted the Democratic party.
For the Democratic party to go into November with the above message and then expect the voters to forgive them is akin to the UK Conservatives believing that the UK electorate will reward Rishi Sunak for removing Liz Truss after she crashed the economy.
Obama gets this.
The people casually calling in public for removing the President they were 100% behind 24hrs ago and the VP they told Americans to vote for because it threatens their job security are political morons.
The entire party including the new ticket would be inviting this sort of credibility loss. They would be transformed into figures of mockery overnight.
Biden declining to run for a second term after the 2022 midterms probably leads to a polling bump.
Quitting under the pressure of the NYT and Nate Silver calling him senile sets off calls for a resignation. Not picking Kamala makes her prospective presidency untenable.
In fairness he is right about them.
Both Biden and the media/political class understate how unpopular this Administration’s performance/policy record has been which leads to them overvaluing the personal factor of Biden’s age/Kamala’s unpopularity v a mythical generic D liberal
