You Don't Mess Around With Jim

Donald Trump has 91 indictments against him, he's been caught by New York State for inflating his assets to qualify for bank loans, he has advocated for former Army Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley to be executed and for shoplifters to be shot on sight, he's ridiculed Nancy Pelosi's husband for being attacked in his own home, and he's allegedly sold nuclear-submarine secrets to an Australian businessman!

So why is he ten points ahead of Joe Biden in an ABC News/Washington Post 2024 presidential general-election matchup poll?   Why did ABC's Martha Raddatz feel the need to go full Ricky Ricardo on Democratic operative Donna Brazile last Sunday on "This Week" and tell her how she had some splainin' to do?  Why is Trump still a viable candidate for President?

The reasons boil down to people's personal frustration with President Biden, and Democratic strategist James Carville sees the problem.  He points out that Biden, possibly unfairly, is seen as being too old and too feeble to handle the Presidency.  Also, there's the economy.  Despite the fact that the economy is improving, more and more Americans disapprove of Biden's handling of it and trust the Republicans more on economics largely due to persistent inflation, which Americans feel with increasing acuity.  In fact, even though job growth is strong, it's fueling inflation, which leads to higher interest rates, which leads to higher interest payments on loans.  Biden can't win for losing.  To be fair, the media don't help matters any by reporting the down side of a stronger labor market - the pressures on inflation - and so turning Biden's victories into defeats.  But it's unlikely that the media could influence Americans with a positive spin on the economy any more than Biden can.  Positive spins don't lower the price of food at the supermarket.   

Carville opines that if Biden and Trump are the major presidential nominees for 2024, Trump has the edge in spite of everything against him because people have grown impatient with Biden and do not see him as a strong leader.  Quite frankly, neither Trump nor Biden are popular, but because Trump supporters are more enthusiastic about their candidate than Democrats are about Biden, they'd be more likely to vote in what could be the last presidential election in our lifetimes if Trump wins and assumes the role of Dear Leader.  And some disaffected progressives might vote for Cornel West instead. 

If this all sounds familiar, that's because I was basically saying the same thing in an earlier blog post.  But this is James Carville this time, and his opinion carries more weight than mine.

Also, many folks seem peeved at Biden because they appear to think his decision to stand for a second term is more out of ego than out of a genuine belief that he is the most electable Democratic going into the next presidential election cycle.  In other words, he's like Hillary Clinton in 2016.  Whom Trump creamed.  The next presidential election could be like 2016 all over again, with similarly disastrous results.  Because while the ABC News/Washington Post poll cited above is an outlier, most other polls show Biden and Trump dead even, and so a few thousand votes in a handful of states that could go either way could (will?) make the difference.

The obvious solution, short of putting pep pills in Biden's morning coffee, is for someone else to run for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.  But it looks now like there is no one else. California governor Gavin Newsom is seen as yet another golden boy who's all tinsel and little substance, Vice President Kamala Harris is too unpopular, Pete Buttigieg is too young, and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer isn't as well known as Newsom, Harris or  Buttigieg.   The Democratic Party is virtually devoid of younger contenders and rising stars.  You can thank the Democratic National Committee for that, as they spend much of the 2010s ignoring down-ballot elections and  discouraging would-be presidential candidates to protect Hillary Clinton's claim on the 2016 nomination.  And - I'm sorry to pick on another grandmother - Nancy Pelosi didn't help matters any as Speaker and as House Democratic leader when she froze out younger members who questioned - nay, challenged - her authority.  When Tim Ryan (whom I have to apologize to for bashing him when he became a natural-gas lobbyist, but that's going to have to be another post) attempted to assert himself as a potential Democratic House leader, Pelosi insisted that he had no constituency.  And I have to call out Michigan senator Gary Peters, who chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in the previous electoral cycle, because he's the reason Ryan doesn't have a constituency anymore.   

This is how a party builds for the future?

Joe Biden isn't running for a second term because he thinks he alone can defeat Trump in 2024.  He's running for a second term because he alone is the only viable choice for the Democratic presidential nomination.  Calling for Biden to step aside will only fall flat, because you can't replace him with nobody.  Unless you replace him with Seth Moulton, then you would replace him with nobody.  And even if there is someone you could run in place of Biden (who knows, there might be), no one in the Democratic Party would allow that person to step up.  When Jim Carville warned Democrats the running Biden next year would be a grave mistake, former (let me stress that - former) Democratic Long Island congressman Steve Israel accused Carville of repeating Republican talking points.  Sort of reminds me when another guy named Jim - former Virginia senator Jim Webb - warned Democrats not to ignore working-class voters in 2016 and suggested that many of them who had voted for Obama might vote for Trump, and he was dismissed as an irrelevant failed politician.  (Or as Howard Fineman said famously said about Webb, "Who cares?") 

Yeah, well, maybe you could get away with dismissing a one-term senator who's been confused with the guy who wrote "MacArthur Park." But hear me now and believe me later: James Carville is what you'd get when you cross a parrot with a tiger.  When he talks, you'd better listen.