David Stockman's Contra Corner
July 24, 2024
Hurrah, they finally took away Grandpa Joe's keys. Fortunately, the political upheaval that is sure to follow is no joke. Actually, it begs to turn out more like the Great Cackle that saved America.
What we mean is that the collective Dem Hive on the banks of the Potomac not only defenestrated "Joe Biden" from a second floor White House window, and did so unceremoniously and without regard for his frail infirmities, but it also effectively knee-capped the credibility of the whole Democrat Party by coronating Kamala Harris in one instantaneous fell swoop. And that's the real hurrah!
After all, the Dems held a "primary" in which 15 million of the party faithful voted for "Joe Biden" because the party insiders had instituted up to 60 rules changes and process maneuvers that closed the door to all competition-most especially Robert Kennedy Jr. Indeed, these procedural roadblocks were so daunting that they surely would have prevented even FDR or the Lord Jesus Christ himself from challenging their handpicked champion of "saving democracy" in America.
Yet these same warriors for "democracy" have already--within hours of the Tweet signed by "Joe Biden"-anointed Kamala Harris as the new presumptive nominee. Never mind what the 3,896 delegates "pledged" to Joe Biden might think or even what the 747 superdelegates pledged to the donor class might prefer. The beltway insiders and their K-street capos were not about to have an open convention-lest an unseemly row in Chicago open the door to a Trumpian return to the Oval Office. And that's absolutely verboten because, well, democracy.
In any event, never before has a major party jettisoned its "presumptive nominee" less than 15 weeks before election day. Even in the case of Lyndon Johnson's unexpected exit in 1968 his withdrawal happened in March, and no shadowy clique of Washington insiders and careerists put a horse's head in his bed, either.
In fact, LBJ could read the polls like few others. And after the Tet Offensive in February 1968 and Uncle Walter Cronkite's pronouncement that the Vietnam war was lost, he could see that his chances for another term were doomed, as well.
Moreover, LBJ didn't just send a courier to drop-off a bland statement at the White House press room on a Sunday afternoon. To the contrary, he spoke to the American public directly from the Oval Office, leaving no doubt that it was his decision to drop out of the race, and that he would be deploying his ample political energies and savvy to steering the then wobbling ship of state for the balance of his term.
After Sunday's insider rug-pull, however, "Joe Biden's" swan song couldn't have contrasted more sharply. As one wag noted today,
The most consequential decision of Joe Biden's presidency was executed by tweet Sunday, via a screenshot of a letter, posted at 1:46 p.m. There was no press conference, video, or photo commemorating any human being's participation in the event. The letter wasn't posted on the White House briefing room site, even as lesser news (including a statement purporting to quote Biden at length on " climate pollution reduction grants") was posted yesterday. It was furthermore written neither on presidential stationery nor under campaign letterhead and appeared rushed, thanking Vice President Kamala Harris for "being an extraordinary partner," but not endorsing her.
In a second tweet 27 minutes later, however, @JoeBiden announced, "Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year." Papers from The Washington Post to The New York Times reported Biden " wrote in a letter he posted" or " said in a statement" he was dropping out. However, we didn't hear from any official spokesperson, not even deputy platforms director Andy Volosky (who reportedly runs Biden's Twitter account), explaining how the announcement came to be. To say a president breaking up with America via digital post-it note is bizarre is a massive understatement.
So, yes, there is a fair question as to who is America's actual president right now? Obama? The Clintons? A billionaire donors' clique? Or the Deep State blob that oozes through the White House walls regardless of which wing of the UniParty actually has the conn?
Still, the Sunday contretemps may yet become America's salvation. Give Kamala three months on the campaign trail and the Dems will become so politically demoralized, ideologically befuddled and electorally marginalized that the once majority party in America could well go the way of the 1852 Whig Party's ticket.
Even then, the Whig nominee, General Winfield Scott, lost the south, the election and the party for the admirable reason that he was no friend of slavery. Kamala will loose it all, of course, because she has been a clamorous champion of the woke, DEI, climate crisis obsessed catechism of the Washington political elites, even as the Dem working class base in Flyover America has been forfeited to the Trumpian GOP.
As Lionel Shriver of Unherd put it in a piece published right before Sunday's upheaval, "Joe Biden's" 48 months ago DEI hire for the Veep spot on his ticket may well prove to be the nail in the Dem coffin.
Kamala pushes the whole progressive DEI shtick. You can hardly blame her, since it's an obsession with "identity", competence be damned, that got her where she is today. The sole reason Biden picked the woman for VP to begin with - who had, remember, all but called him a racist during the 2020 debates - was her status as a triple token: female, check, black, check, and as a cherry-on-the-sundae sweetener, South Asian, check. As a president, she'd be so painfully out of her depth that the progressive hard leftists who've clearly manipulated Biden's policies are probably salivating, because controlling Kamala's agenda could be even easier.
..... (she won't) do that much better than when she ran for president the first time, then proving so unpopular even in her own state of California that she bowed out before testing herself in a single primary. Never underestimate the far-Left-led party's capacity to utterly misread the electorate and nominate some Witless Woke Weirdo -
......If Kamala Harris takes Biden's place at the top of the ticket, I'm still a double hater, and I'm still agonized over which presidential candidate I revile the more. She's an intellectual lightweight - and I'm being polite. She cannot think on her feet. I've never heard her say anything original or observant; at her best, she simply recites the party line. At her worst, she's too lazy to memorize the party line, for she has a history of not bothering to do her homework before official appearances. Much like Jill Biden, she often resorts to the persona of a kindergarten teacher. She comes across as a fake, and most voters - most people, even children - are keenly attuned to artifice. (Trump is an asshole, but at least he's genuinely an asshole.) She has a reputation as personally unpleasant, helping to explain why she's run through staff like disposable cutlery.
Kamala is (also) an atrocious orator. Should she secure the nomination, her vapid, meaningless, repetitious, and asinine rhetoric during her vice presidency has gifted the Trump campaign with a series of upcoming TV adverts that will be not only devastating but winningly hilarious. Brace yourself for whole 30-second spots that do nothing but splice episodes of Kamala's signature nervous cackle back-to-back.
So nothing could have been more beneficial to RFK's third-party insurgency than the overnight coronation of Kamala Harris. And that's not merely because of her hideous stage presence or that she was the ostensible Border Czar during a period in which 10 million illegals allegedly invaded the southern border.
No, RFK's real opening is that Kamala is the very epitome of the bi-coastal elite's takeover of the Dem party. As the astute alternative media commentator, Micheal Tracey said today, once again they have made a shambles of "democracy":
Kamala received zero delegates in 2020, muscled her way to VP through "insider" machinations, received zero delegates in 2024, now muscling her way to a presidential nomination through "insider" machinations. Owes her entire ascendance to Dem Party elites, as opposed to voters
These Dem insiders, in turn, have become so infected with the twin ills of the TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) and the identity politics of the leftist intelligentsia (sic!) that it now stands for the very opposite of what sensible Democrats of the 1960s stood for during the era of the martyred John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.
For crying out loud, Kamala is a war-hawk who has no clue that Ukraine is irrelevant to the homeland security of America. Or that NATO, which has outlived its usefulness by more than three decades, is nothing more than a global marketing organization for the the military-industrial complex.
Likewise, she does not even remotely recognize that the public debt, now at $35 trillion, is inexorably heading for a catastrophic $150 trillion by mid-century under UniParty policies. Or even that the rogue money-printers at the Federal Reserve have enabled this fiscal disaster-along with the unspeakable windfall gains from the vastly inflated financial assets held by the top 1%.
Furthermore, where was Kamala when the Biden administration was forcing 250 million American arms to receive the inadequately tested and unsafe clot shots? Or when Biden Administration apparatchiks were busy browbeating the social media into crushing any dissent from these misbegotten mandates?
Indeed, for all her race-howling we doubt Kamala even recognizes that the First Amendment's protections of freedom of speech, the press, assembly and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances was the bedrock upon which the scourge of racial segregation and discrimination was excised from the land.
In short, RFK now has a tremendous opening to reel-in enough battleground state electoral votes to send Kamala to the showers and deprive Trump of the requisite 270 votes in the Electoral College. In that respect, a current Zogby poll shows that in a two-way race with Trump RFK comes out on top by 57% to 43%; and that in a three-way race he is garnering 22% and rising rapidly.
So, yes, the Great Cackler may cause such a severe erosion of the Dem vote to RFK that it forces the election into the US House of Representatives for the first time in 200 years.
In turn, that means that after the impending Harris campaign debacle of the next 105 days, one thing is rather certain. To wit, only RFK will be positioned to stop the Donald in the US House. By January 2025 the Kamala-demoralized and diminished Blue State delegations will have no other place to go.
Reprinted with permission from David Stockman's Contra Corner.