I expect it will be the SAME a year from now and next November….
Unless something off the walls happen to ole’ Joe?
He’s gonna be the one on the ballot next November….
Democrats ARE going to have to swallow hard with the prospect that if Joe Biden falter’s during a second term?
Kamala Harris IS gonna be one going forward…..
The only other Democratic lawmaker willing to publicly call for a new nominee in 2024 was Phillips’s fellow Minnesotan, Rep. Angie Craig, who also said the same last year.
“I said it, I still believe it, but if the president chooses to run again I’ll respect that decision and I’ll support him,” Craig told me. She and Phillips both told me they never heard from the White House after making their initial statements, a reminder of the soft touch from this president.
Another reminder of why Biden enjoys goodwill from Democratic leaders came more recently, when the president did telephone Craig — after she was assaulted in an elevator. Biden called the congresswoman soon after, checking in on her and wishing her a happy birthday. As Craig put it to me before the attack took place: “Joe Biden is a really good man.”
But it’s hardly just Biden’s decency and gift for personal connection that keeps Democrats at bay.
Remarkable as it may sound for an 80-year-old, self-diagnosed “gaffe machine,” he has become the political equivalent of a safe harbor, at least in the minds of his lieutenants and many party leaders.
….
“We know what we have and we know the stakes in 2024, we cannot lose,” Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina told me. “And that was the thinking of nominating Joe Biden in 2020 to start with. It worked then, why is it not going to work now?”
Saluting his candidacy is publicly framed as simply backing an incumbent president, dog bites man, nothing to see here.
In truth, it gets them out of a potentially messy primary, buys them time on his eventual, and perhaps equally messy, succession and helps keep the focus on Trump and the Republicans, which is both the adhesive that binds their coalition and their best calling card for the broader electorate: See, we’re not those guys.
“Politics has become not about what you want but what you don’t want,” as Jim Hodges, the former South Carolina governor, put it.
There’s something more cynical at work with the public show support of Biden, however. It’s an exercise in escape-hatch politics (a new sort of the Democrats’ politics of evasion).
By simply stating their support for the president’s reelection, they may be suppressing their misgivings but they’re also avoiding the inevitable follow-up question: Well, are you for the vice president?….
…
More to the point, Democrats have seen what happens when anyone in their party openly criticizes Harris — they’re accused by activists and social-media critics of showing, at best, racial and gender insensitivity. This doesn’t stifle concerns about her prospects, of course, it just pushes them further underground or into the shadows of background quotes.
Such as this, from a House Democrat: “The Democrats who will need to speak out on her are from the Congressional Black Caucus, no white member is going to do it.”
Members of the CBC, however, are either supportive of Harris or no more willing to give public voice to their unease with the vice president than the above lawmaker.
One senior Black lawmaker, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), was more candid than most in discussing the party’s calculation behind rallying to Biden.
“He’s the president,” Beatty told me. “And right now he says he’s going to be our candidate. And people will fall in line because he can win the general election.”
Putting a finer point on it, she said: “Biden is the guy that can beat Trump.”….
Note…
The Gavin Newsom possible 2024 stuff went away, eh?
image…AP News