Here’s Why Democrats Need To Get Their Sh*t Together And End This Farce About Replacing VP Kamala Harris And/Or Joe Biden

Democrats need to publicly and privately get their heads around the idea that there is no way President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris will be replaced on the 2024 Democratic ticket — and more importantly, no reason they should be.

The Democrats have recently inflicted self-induced wounds on themselves via the following play in three acts:

Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) set tongues wagging when she was asked “Is Vice President Kamala Harris the best running mate for this president?” and, despite effusively praising VP Harris, would only say the choice is the president’s.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) then did a “hold my beer!” on Thursday’s edition of The Lead when he tap-danced his way around the same question and wound up considering the merits of a Jake Tapper vice-presidency.

Finally, on Sunday’s edition of MSNBC’s Inside With Jen Psaki, Raskin cleaned it all up by explaining that he thought Tapper “was trying to get me to pick a fight with my friend, Nancy Pelosi, which I’m not going to do.”

What I love about this little drama, by which I mean hate, is that it perfectly encapsulates the problems Democrats face — from within and from without.

I suspect that Pelosi answered the way she did out of a natural instinct to be skeptical of the media and their questions, as well as an institutional respect that prevented her from what she viewed as speaking on the president’s behalf. This isn’t mirror supposition, this is my observation after covering Democratic politics across several decades.

And in Raskin’s case, it was a similar case of classic Democratic overthinking, trying to play three-dimensional chess with a political media that is relentlessly hardwired to filter everything through their predetermined “Dems in disarray” lens.

In other words, this isn’t all their fault. Democrats have faced a media so desperate to be able to seem objective that they go to absurd lengths to make false equivalencies between the two parties, one of which supports an openly racist insurrectionist who faces 91 felonies and over 700 years in jail, and has been legally adjudicated a sexual abuser, one who, in the words of federal Judge Lewis Kaplan, “did in fact ‘rape’ Ms. [E. Jean] Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside New York Penal Law.”

In the face of that onslaught, it’s no wonder Democrats don’t know whether to shit or go blind.

But what they did was feed into a narrative that has been building for a very long time, and is the result of several related factors.

In Biden’s case, the idea of replacing him at the top of the ticket rests largely on relentless push-polling and over-coverage of his age that is completely out of proportion to the facts, as well as to the amount of coverage given to the issue for his similarly-aged opponent. President Biden and ex-President Donald Trump are separated by 3 years, but you’d never know it by the amount of attention each of them gets over it.

Objectively speaking, there is no comparison between the two in terms of demonstrable fitness — even before it became the “but her emails” of the 2020 campaign, Biden was constantly filmed and photographed doing active things like zooming by on his mountain bike to zing Peter Doocy.

You could argue it’s a matter of opinion who has the greater pension for misspeaking, but it’s really no contest there either. Trump rattles off bizarre unhinged and grammatically unconnected streams of consciousness on the regular, whereas Biden will occasionally misspeak, or demonstrate some other artifact of the lifelong struggle with stuttering that has been well-documented. But none of his misspeaks or exaggerations or other supposed gaffes have ever included suspending the U.S. Constitution or confessing to crimes ranging from sexual assault to obstruction of justice.

The main difference here is that Trump and Republicans have no shame about relentlessly and baselessly attacking someone who has repeatedly been judged fit for the presidency by an actual well-respected White House physician, not a complete lunatic who once claimed Trump was some kind of a genetic Superman who “might live to be 200” and now spends his time ranting like the drunkest MAGA fan being interviewed by RSBN while in line for a Trump rally.

Democrats, on the other hand, have shied away from attacking Trump over his age, only resorting to “I know you are but what am I”-type rejoinders when the attack has already been burned into the American psyche like the initials on the knob of a Louisville Slugger. But this is not to their discredit.

No, it is the political media that has taken this baton and not only run with it, but clubbed every Democratic bystander watching the race along the way. Yes, they asked people about Trump as well, but after years of amplifying Republican attacks, the asymmetry is baked in. What they should have been doing is their jobs: report the facts of President Biden’s fitness for office and challenge the attacks Every. Single. Time.

There’s another dimension to this push to replace Biden, which is this other push-polled idea that there’s not enough energy or enthusiasm for the president — but as anyone who can read a poll will tell you, there is no other candidate with even close to Biden’s popularity.

As Kate Bedingfield astutely pointed out when CNN was doing non-stop O-face over their poll in which a large majority of Democrats said they wanted another candidate, 82% of those same people couldn’t name another candidate. And I think no other candidate got more than 3%.

The media also feeds into this by acting like it’s a legitimate question whether Biden should debate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. when no incumbent ever debates a challenger from his own party — especially not one who traffics in conspiracy theories about Jews being spared by Covid.

The case of Vice President Kamala Harris is a little bit more complex, and definitely has everything to do with race and gender — mostly race. Now before you start bleating, “Oh so you’re saying if I don’t support Harris I must be a racist!” I’m going to need you to simmer down. I mean some of you might be, that’s just statistics, but it also has to do with explicit and implicit biases, some of which come from within and some of which are imprinted in the media coverage of the vice president.

It’s mostly race, but that would probably change if there were another woman actually put forward on the ticket, because then it would be “oh well I want a woman but just not that woman.”

But for now, it’s mostly race. There is that old dynamic of needing to do twice as well to get half the credit, That’s a real thing, but there are other racial dynamics at play as well. Some well-intentioned White media figures likely scrutinize Harris more heavily in a conscious or subconscious effort to prove that they are not considering her race.

There’s also a group of people, voters and journalists alike, who don’t view themselves as racists but who are nonetheless convinced to varying degrees that because Biden promised to select a Black woman as his running mate, that necessarily means that Harris did not obtain her position based on merit. This is a common brainworm, especially in those who think of themselves as independents, and while it’s not racist in the way that hooded klansmen burning a cross is racist it is a breed of racial resentment that is fueled by a similar ignorance. You don’t need to be steeped in the history of racial injustice to understand that concepts of “merit” are deeply influenced by it.

Whatever the motivation, the coverage of Vice President Harris has been demonstrably unfair.

Biden has treated Harris has a partner from day one, and demonstrated this in ways that can be objectively measured and seen by White House reporters who just refused to objectively measure and see them.

For example, as I recently told NABJ award-winning journalist Roland Martin, Vice President Mike Pence issued just six solo statements during all four years of the Trump presidency. Vice President Harris is closing in on 40 such statements in 2 and 1/2 years. There have been many occasions on which she was the first person in the administration to speak on a momentous issue. She was very publicly handed several high-profile issues to handle in her portfolio, stubborn issues that don’t always have a political upside like the root causes of migration. And Harris has been spearheading the issue of reproductive freedom, perhaps the most consequential political issue facing this administration given its importance in the upcoming election.

Now try to remember what Pence ever did besides staging an early exit from a football game and managing not to get himself hung. The thing he’s given the most credit for — literally doing the minimum required of him by not engaging in treason — occurred after the election. Yet you never saw relentless coverage and polls suggesting he be replaced, even though there were actual sources for reputable outlets like Axios saying such a move was actually considered.

There’s also a tremendous blind spot among white critics of Harris who don’t understand or care about the significance of her status as the first Black woman to occupy the office, which makes her the most politically powerful Black woman in U.S. history. For example, Josh Barro recently puzzled aloud, “Where is the evidence of this mass voter emotional investment in Kamala Harris? Certainly it’s not in her electoral track record.”

Couple of things, here, Josh. First of all, I hate to break it to you but Harris was on a ticket that broke the record for the most votes ever –81 million — cast for a presidential ticket. Weird that someone wouldn’t think that was part of her electoral track record. Before that, she literally never lost an election: she dropped out of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary before a single vote was cast. So that’s literally her electoral track record — not too shabby.

It’s possible he’s referring more to her performance in public opinion polls, where her approval rating is about the same as Biden’s but in which she consistently defeats all other Democrats who are polled against her — maybe not always by margins clear enough to convince Josh.

But what Barro and others determined to are you against Harris either deliberately ignore or just don’t seem to realize is that no Democrat — not Joe Biden or Gavin Newsom or Jesus Christ (D-Nazareth) — can win a presidential election without killer turnout among Black voters, and the surest way to depress turnout among Black voters is to try and demote the first Black woman VP in history. The second surest way would be to pass her over and nominate someone else to the top of the ticket were Biden to step down. That’s it, lights out, end of story.

And, I cannot say this enough times, there is no reason to do any of this. President Biden and Vice President Harris have a record of accomplishment that should be easy to run on if the media had not frightened all Democrats into never ever bragging about good news on the economy. Can you imagine a Republican apologizing for having the lowest inflation in the developed world following a pandemic while also creating record numbers of jobs and keeping unemployment at record lows for like 2 years consecutively and passing bipartisan infrastructure and economic rescue legislation?

Not to mention that whole running-against-rapist-adjacent-insurrectionist-violence-inciting-racist-dude-who-uses-national-secrets-as-Post-Its thing.

The fact of the matter is that even if you think the concerns about VP Harris and President Biden are legitimate — and while I believe they are fair I do not believe they are legitimate — there is no better team to defeat Trump or whoever else the Republicans throw at Democrats, and no one better to run the country.

All of these displays of hand ringing and bedwetting serve no purpose but to make it easier for Trump to win. It has to stop.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.