Democracy Should Mean Biden Stays as the Democratic Party’s Nominee

It’s right there in the name: the Democratic Party. They keep saying they’re the party of “Our Democracy,” while Trump and the Republicans tried to overthrow Our Democracy on Jan. 6, 2021.

Then why are Democrats trying to push aside the democratically – and Democratic Partyly – chosen nominee of the Democratic Party, Joe Biden?

Those of us who have been around long enough have been watching Joe Biden through his whole caree, from when he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972 until today. This year he won every Democratic primary. The voters saw he wasn’t as sharp as he had been in the past. They saw his decline. They voted for him anyway as the best Party candidate to defeat Donald J. Trump.

Well?

Then Democrats should not be trying to get rid of him. Party Svengali James Carville just put up an op-ed in the New York Times, the Party’s newspaper, with a new anti-democratic – and anti-Democratic Party – scheme, for an anti-Biden putsch. Aside from the anti-Trump invective, the Ragin’ Cajun conspires:

I want to see the Democratic Party hold four historic town halls between now and the Democratic National Convention in August — one each in the South, the Northeast, the Midwest and the West. We can recruit the two most obvious and qualified people in the world to facilitate substantive discussions: Barack Obama and Bill Clinton….

Think the Super Bowl with Taylor Swift in the stands. The young, the old and everyone in between will tune in to see history being made in real time.

I’m sure they even could get Taylor to put on a show as the opening act. Who would be invited?

So I would advise Presidents 42 and 44 to select eight leading contenders out of the pool of those who choose to run, with Ms. Harris most definitely getting a well-earned invite….

Town halls will give Americans a fresh look at Ms. Harris and introduce them to our deep bench of smart, dynamic, tested leaders. In addition, Democratic delegates will get to further grill and stress-test these leaders in public and private meetings before a formal vote of all the delegates at the Democratic convention.

It’s obvious there would be nothing democratic about this process. The party honchos would pick someone and the system would be rigged in his or her favor.

That’s how the Soviets picked their leader after Stalin died. The Politburo picked one of its own to be the new premier, later the president. He was presented to the Supreme Soviet for rubber-stamp approval. And that was that.

In the 1980s, that led to a series of short-lived Bidenish vegetables: Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. Then they finally came up with the much younger Gorbachev. He went on to wind down the Cold War with Reagan.

Maybe that’s the plan: The Democratic Politburo picks a younger person, an American Gorbachev, first to defeat Trump, then to make deals and bring peace to Ukraine, the Middle East and the Pacific. Which is what Trump would do if he wins.

The elites who run the show don’t want an old coot blowing up the world any more than do the rest of us. Hence the putsch against Biden.

It may be Our Democracy, but don’t call the process “democratic.”