[ExI] US Democrat Playbook

[Adrian Tymes]

On Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 12:24 AM Kelly Anderson via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Adrian...
>
> On Sat, Jul 6, 2024 at 9:46 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> > On Sat, Jul 6, 2024 at 10:41 PM Kelly Anderson via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> >> It seems perfectly safe at this point to predict that
> >> Biden (who is no longer an empty vessel, has caused a fair bit of
> >> inflation, and is widely thought to be possibly empty headed in a
> >> quite literal way) will be replaced before the election.
> >
> > HAHAHA no.
>
> HAHAHA yes.
>

I will admit, I assigned very low odds to this outcome - though I maintain
that "will be replaced" includes it not being by his choice/not with his
cooperation, while what happened instead was that he got talked into
stepping down.

(I do wonder if some health issue came up after all.  I hear he caught
COVID, but he seems to have recovered.  If this is what caused him to bow
out, we likely won't know until after the election, probably not until he's
fully out of office.)

But that's semantics, I suppose (though it does solve the problem of
overruling the primary voters).  What matters is that he's out.

> 1) Who specifically would they replace him with?  The only Democrat who
> does better than Biden on most polls, Michelle Obama, is not running and
> can not be made to run.  If they don't have a specific person to replace
> him with, then there is no replacement; to say he will be replaced without
> any idea of who to replace him with, is like the Republicans going on and
> on and on and on about repealing the Affordable Care Act but having nothing
> to replace it with.  (This is the main reason why, when it came to the
> actual votes, no full repeal has yet made it all the way through.  It's the
> same deal with replacing Biden.)
>
> Biden wants Harris. I don't know if Biden gets to make this choice. I
> think it's the delegates to the Democratic convention. Harris isn't a
> sufficiently empty vessel IMHO to win.


Agreed (except that I think Harris has a chance even with her record).  I
see at least two problems with selecting anyone else, though:

1) SInce Biden is stepping down, Harris can make a case that she is what's
left of what the primary voters voted for.  No one else has such a claim
that I know of.

2) Who, that has enough name recognition to stand a chance of winning, is a
sufficiently empty vessel?  They have to pick some specific person, so if
the union of "has enough name recognition" and "is a sufficiently empty
vessel" is a null set, they can't win with your recommended strategy.

Between those two, the Democrats may be stuck with Harris aa a practical
matter.

Of course, events have been
> interesting lately to say the least. So who knows how this is all
> going to go down.
>

Agreed again.  Jockeying for Democratic VP appears to be the next bit of
political theater.  I note with some irony that the apparently most likely
Democratic Presidential candidate is from the state I am from, and one of
the front runners for the replacement Democratic Vice Presidential
candidate is the governor of the state I moved to.

>
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