Historical Parallels: Will Biden Face a Thomas Eagleton Moment?

by Don Surber

The melodrama surrounding efforts to get Freeze Frame Joe to quit his re-election campaign is the media’s way of coping with the way the Acme Presidential Debate turned out. The wily coyotes at CNN and in the Democrat Party wrote the debate rules in a manner designed to keep Trump from dominating. This focused attention on Pedo Joe, who turned out to be an open-mouth ghost. Once again, instead of catching Trump, they blew their own candidate up. Meep, meep.

The pressure is so high that Dark Brandon turned orange for his reading off the teleprompter on live TV last night.

The media now is playing up whether FJB will abandon his campaign because that story line distracts attention from their knowing all along that Biden’s brain is 11 donuts shy of a dozen.

Axios said:

“Joe Biden’s close aides have carefully shielded him from people inside and outside the White House since the beginning of his presidency.

“Why it matters: The intermittent access has resulted in many current and former White House aides being shocked at the 81-year-old president’s limitations at the debate Thursday night.

“Driving the news: Current and former White House aides are feeling whiplash — and now questioning whether Biden could fulfill a second term.

• “It’s time for Joe to go.” That’s what Chandler West, the White House’s deputy director of photography from January 2021 to May 2022, wrote in an Instagram story after the debate.
• “I know many of these people and how the White House operates. They will say he has a ‘cold’ or just experienced a ‘bad night,’ but for weeks and months, in private, they have all said what we saw last night — Joe is not as strong as he was just a couple of years ago,” West wrote, according to screenshots obtained by Axios.
• Reached by phone, West said he wrote the post because “the debate was not the first bad day, and it’s not gonna be the last.” He declined to comment further.
• The president and his team have acknowledged Biden had a bad night but said he had a cold.

“Zoom in: Biden’s behavior stunned many in the White House in part because Biden’s closest aides — often led by Jill Biden’s top aide, Anthony Bernal, and deputy chief of staff Annie Tomasini — took steps early in his term to essentially rope off the president.”

The fate of FJB is unknown to me but I do know that if he leaves, Kamala is the Democrat Party’s only hope. To pass her over would create another Thomas Eagleton Moment for Democrats.

Let us take a trip down memory lane courtesy of NPR. The occasion was the 40th anniversary of Eagleton’s 18 days as a vice presidential candidate in 1972. NPR said:

In the middle of July 1972, thousands of delegates arrived in Miami for the Democratic convention. Today, conventions are scripted and choreographed events, but back then, that wasn’t the case.

“We went to the convention very uncertain as to whether or not we could sustain our delegations,” former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, who served as McGovern’s campaign manager, told Weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

McGovern was the insurgent candidate, and on his road to the nomination, he managed to alienate the party’s old guard. So McGovern needed a running mate who could unite the Democrats.

Joshua Glasser, author of The Eighteen-Day Running Mate, told NPR, “All their polling told them that Ted Kennedy was the guy they needed on their ticket. If they had him on the ticket, they would have a reasonable shot at actually beating Nixon come the fall.”

There was just one little problem, which NPR failed to mention: Mary Jo Kopechne. She died when a drunken Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge and into Poucha Pond on Chappaquiddick Island. He escaped the car. She did not. He left her to die.

Instead of a Volkswagen, he drove his 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88.

Because of the assassinations of two of his brothers, Ted was let off with a stern warning instead of prison time. He remained in the Senate but he was never a viable national candidate, especially in 1972 when his killing of Kopechne was fresh in the minds of voters.

According to Gary Hart, though, McGovern offered him the job but Kennedy turned it down because he knew if he ran, Nixon would chop him up so badly that he might not get re-elected to the Senate in 1974.

Hart told NPR 40 years later, “I think under the pressure of time, [McGovern] called Sen. Kennedy back and said, ‘Look, Ted, I’ve got to make a decision, are you going to be with me?’ Sen. Kennedy said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ That’s when we went to Eagleton.”

Eagleton punched all the liberal points at the time — abortion, amnesty and acid — on his ticket just like McGovern did. But the bonus was Eagleton was Catholic. NPR’s Ken Rudin said, “McGovern, with real big trouble with Catholic voters, with labor support, looked at Tom Eagleton as almost like the perfect kind of candidate.”

Plus, Eagleton had never killed any woman by drunk driving into a pond.

So McGovern announced Eagleton as his running mate. Democrats approved at their national convention. And everyone lived happily ever after — except for the part where McGovern unplugged Eagleton’s candidacy after learning his running mate underwent electroshock treatment three times.

When the news broke, McGovern held a press conference on July 27, 1972, to announce he was behind Eagleton 1,000 percent.

Five days later, that percentage was down to zero and McGovern dumped Eagleton in favor of a Kennedy-in-law named Sargent Shriver.

Democrats blamed those dumb voters for McGovern 1. not vetting the man, 2. not immediately firing the man, and 3. canning him five days after saying he was behind him 1,000 percent.

Hart told NPR in that 2012 story, “This was the height of the Cold War. The key here wasn’t how do we feel about mental illness or therapy or anything like that. The key was — finger on the button.”

Eagleton’s departure from the ticket led to a 49-state loss by McGovern. It would have been 50 without a Kennedy-in-law carrying Massachusetts for him.

Readers should bear this in mind as they read reports of the Wicked Governor of the North Gretchen Whitmer, or Gavin “Brylcreem” Newsom or Hillary or anyone else replacing Biden on the ticket because passing over Kamala now is a McGovern-like admission that the party screwed up when they made her vice president.

Which, of course, the party did.

Some party leaders understand that replacing Freeze Frame Joe is not optimal because Cackling Kamala would be even worse.

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