by Bruce Dunlavy
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As the 2024 Presidential election process grinds on, it seems clear that the Democratic Party has a problem. Their candidate, the current President of the United States, is perceived by many, both outside and inside his own party, to be not just a less-than-ideal candidate. Let’s be blunt. He is perceived to be senile.

As I write this, the news outlets are rushing to broadcast the story that it is not only other politicians who are publicly pressuring Joe Biden to withdraw from the race in favor of a more electable candidate. Today that sentiment was uttered by – gasp! – a movie star. George Clooney, a longtime Biden supporter, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times calling on Biden to stand down and let somebody else take up the torch.

This is not something that happens every election cycle. It is conventional wisdom that incumbency provides an advantage, particularly when the incumbent has not had a failed presidency of the sort experienced by Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. The U.S. economy is, by world standards, doing very well. The stock market is up; inflation is down. The country is not at war beyond the sort of policing activities that have marked U. S. foreign operations for most of national history.

Nevertheless, Biden had a poor showing in the so-called “debate” (they are not debates; they are joint press conferences) with his Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump. The appearance of inadequacy and cogency in Biden’s tongue and/or mind brought horrible recollections of the original televised Presidential debate that lifted John F. Kennedy to a victory over Richard Nixon in 1960. Kennedy appeared smooth and controlled while Nixon looked shifty and awkward.

The Democrats are struggling to find a way to get Biden off the ticket without expressly removing him against his will. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi showed a typical straddling act. She said it is important that Biden make clear whether he will stay on the ballot “as soon as possible.” For his part, Biden has repeatedly and emphatically stated that he will not get out of the race, which should firmly answer Pelosi’s request. However, she will not say any more, which gives the impression that she is implicitly begging Biden to quit.

Some seem to think Biden has only recently become an awkward speaker prone to gaffes and misstatements. Seasoned political observers will say that he has always been this way, not just since taking office in 2021, but throughout his long career. Indeed, one wonders how the 81-year-old with a history of public bumbles captured the inside track to the nomination. He had originally said he would be a one-term President, but he and those who originally backed him decided he should give it another shot.

Why this change occurred should not be a mystery. The answer is, as Joe Pesci told Robert DeNiro in the movie Raging Bull, “There’s nobody else.” As the Democrats search for ways to replace Biden, they have not found a better candidate.

Why is there nobody else? Because for 20 years the Ds have been doing what the Rs used to do. The Rs always called on the same old same old. Starting with the presidential election of 1952 and ending with the one in 2004, in 12 of those 13 elections the Republican national ticket included one of the following names: Nixon, Bush, Dole.

The Democrats of those days didn’t go with the “whose-turn-is-it” style of fielding candidates, so they always had a deeper bench. For example, in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election that year, the Democrats had four or five alternatives.

But early in the Twenty-first Century they somehow decided that it was Hillary Clinton’s turn, and by god they were going to elect her. Everyone else got shunted aside and the party wound up with no bench at all.

The results were less than overwhelming. In 2008, Hillary was such a problematic candidate that, even with the party trying to anoint her, she couldn’t beat a Black freshman senator from Illinois that nobody had ever heard of. Did they learn anything from that? Of course they didn’t.

They went right back and re-anointed her in 2016, as if they thought that the same person who couldn’t even get her own party’s nomination when they tried to hand it to her on a silver platter would somehow be a better candidate eight years later, eight years older, with eight years more baggage. She wasn’t. In fact, she was likely the only Democrat who could lose to Trump. Admittedly, he was likely the only Republican who could have lost to Hillary, but the way we elect presidents ensured that he didn’t.

The Democratic Party was so single-minded in preparing the way for Hillary Clinton to become the first female U. S. President that they refused to countenance the possibility that she might be unelectable. Anyone from the party elite who wanted to challenge her was quickly pushed down, and those who might have done so were so fearful of reprisals that they decided not to press the matter.

Image credit: ndtv.com

Now the Democrats are in a pickle. They do not have an obvious alternative. They do not have even a notable alternative. Their failure to have a set of shadow candidates – or even one – has left them scrambling now. This is not the time for shaking up a ticket that has been in place for this long. The Democrats might remember 1960, but have they forgotten 1972?

That was the year they nominated Sen. George McGovern for President and Sen. Thomas Eagleton for Vice-President. Rather quickly, it became known that Eagleton had once undergone treatment for clinical depression. The stigma of mental illness made the party displace Eagleton from the ticket. With no one else available on short notice, they replaced him with R. Sargent Shriver, an apparatchik known almost exclusively for being the first head of the Peace Corps and related by marriage to the Kennedys.

Incumbent President Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew smashed the McGovern/Eagleton ticket like a bug, and the left wing of the Democratic Party has not recovered since. Pulling in a new candidate without sufficient time for vetting and field-testing is too dangerous. The Democrats got lucky in 2020 because even though they had ruined their bench by putting all their eggs in the Clinton basket, they did have a well-known, seasoned potential candidate. He was 77 years old and prone to awkward mistakes, but he had been a two-term Vice-President under the popular Barack Obama. Win or lose, they would have four years in which to find a young, effective, and powerful individual to top their national ticket.

When the time came for that individual to take the stage, something had changed. The candidate they had been lucky enough to have in 2020 was back for another run. Four years older, with four years more baggage. It had been so long since they had had a stable of potential candidates that the system for selecting one had gone out of order.

This is where the Democratic Party finds itself today. It is not Joe Biden’s fault; it is the party’s fault. They didn’t get here overnight. They have been on this road for 20 years and have no one to blame but themselves.