17 Jul It Starts with T, and that Rhymes with G, and that Stands for Gavin
The United States is in trouble. Serious trouble.
We have hinted around at this before, but we don’t know that we’ve ever put this explicitly: Joe Biden will NOT be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024.
Now, we know that this may seem counterintuitive, given how aggressively the party has cleared the path for Biden to run essentially unopposed, but it is, nevertheless, our (firm) expectation.
Biden is no longer fit to be president (and that’s assuming that he ever was). This is largely inarguable. He was only marginally fit three years ago – which is why his staff wisely took advantage of the pandemic to hide him away in his basement for most of the campaign – and he has grown significantly worse since. Only a few on the Left or in the media are willing to say it, but everyone knows it. Just four days ago, CNN reported the following:
The conversations keep happening – quiet whispers on the sidelines of events, texts, emails, furtive phone calls – as top Democrats and donors reach out to those seen as possible replacement presidential candidates.
Get ready, they urge, in conversations that aides to several of the people involved have described to CNN: Despite what he has said, despite the campaign that has been announced, President Joe Biden won’t actually be running for reelection.
They feel like time is already running out and that the lack of the more robust campaign activity they want to see is a sign that his heart isn’t really in it.
The piece goes on in interminable detail about the notion that Biden’s heart really isn’t in it, that he doesn’t seem as prepared as he should be or as prepared as he and Obama were in 2012. That’s not quite how we would assess the situation, but it all works out the same in the end. CNN says that some Dems are worried about Biden’s motivation. We say that some Dems (and media) are working hard behind the scenes to make it appear that Biden lacks motivation as an excuse to push him out of the race. To-may-to. To-mah-to. Either way, come November 2024, Joe Biden will not be on the top of the ballot.
CNN implies that there are numerous donors out there courting numerous candidates. This may be true, but it’s also misleading. If Biden drops out of the race, then the Democratic nominee will likely be one of two people. The first and most obvious of the two is Vice President Kamala Harris, who can’t win. Unless you’ve spent the last four years in a cave, then you already know that Harris is not a serious person. She is everything that the mainstream media said about Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin. She is dim. She is vapid. And she used her…uhh…feminine wiles to get ahead in politics. More to the point, she is even less popular than Biden, which is saying something.
What that means is that the only serious candidate for the Democratic nomination in a post-Biden race is the only other person who has been campaigning for the nomination – and no, we’re not talking about Robert Kennedy, Jr. Rather, we’re talking about California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has been “unofficially” campaigning for months, in the hope that he could slide into the spot, should Biden falter. Newsom’s foresight will probably be a great benefit to him – which is to say that it could be a serious disaster for the rest of us.
We could probably spend the better part of ten pages explaining what an unmitigated catastrophe Newsom would be as president. But since the inimitable Joel Kotkin – a California resident – did so last week, far better and more succinctly than we could, we’ll just turn it over to him:
For many Democrats, Gavin Newsom has become an object of desire. Aged 55, the Governor of California’s relative youth, coiffed good looks and ability to speak in something close to coherent English contrasts with their bumbling leader, whom as many as two in three Americans feel is not entirely up to the job. As a result, the chorus calling for Newsom to become America’s 47th President has been growing steadily louder….
Yet Newsom’s sparkling ascendency might dim somewhat if the media bothered to consider what is actually happening in his fiefdom. Flicking through the mainstream press, one could be forgiven for realising that Newsom has presided over California’s fall from economic pre-eminence: the Golden State is now home to record homelessness, sub-par GDP growth, the nation’s highest poverty rate, a tech downturn fuelled by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and a consistently underperforming public education system. These factors have fuelled a powerful out-migration trend — up 135% in just two years. Recent polls find upwards of 40% of residents are considering leaving, while the rising tide of wealthy emigrees has already taken away $20 billion in adjusted income since 2018.
When the state was flush, Newsom scored progressive points by handing out subsidies to poorer Californians, creating what was heralded as an ideal “blue welfare state”. California certainly spends more of its budget on welfare than virtually any other state, twice as much as its arch-rival Texas. But, at its best, this growing welfare state reflects a staggering inequality, in which 20% of state wealth is held within 30 zip codes that account for just 2% of the population. At its worst, it comes at the expense of neglecting basic infrastructure, such as roads and water supply.
And this is all in keeping with Newsom’s personal brand of politics. Largely financed by San Francisco’s elite, notably the heirs of the Getty family fortune, he presents the face of an emerging Democratic Party based on what the late Fred Siegel called “an upstairs, downstairs” coalition of the gentry rich, the dependent poor and the vast, well-paid union bureaucracy that serves them. On paper, then, Newsom stands in contrast to the legendary Democratic governor Pat Brown, whose investments in roads, bridges, research universities and water expanded opportunities for ordinary Californians in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Today, Brown’s successor is far more concerned with issues that interest the gentry Left: gender and race politics and, most critically, climate change….
As a recent Breakthrough Institute report demonstrates, Newsom’s drive to make California a leader in the much-ballyhooed “energy transition” has led to high energy and housing costs. California used to be a major energy provider, with a large, well-paid and unionised workforce. Now, as Newsom seeks to eliminate the industry, California gets its oil from Saudi Arabia, importing more of its energy than any mainland state. Elsewhere, the state ranks a poor 42nd in fiscal responsibility, its transport systems face huge deficits, its hospitals are in deep decline, and it accounts for roughly half of all Americans who are unsheltered and living outside.
So what issue now dominates his agenda? How to deal with a reparations task force that has since landed him with an $800 billion bill that the state clearly cannot pay.
Oh.
In normal times, a Newsom candidacy might be welcomed. He and his radical ideology would be eminently beatable. But then, in normal times, the GOP would not be self-immolating. Half of the GOP appears dead set on voting in 2024 for the guy who lost in 2020, while the other half appears dead set on voting for anybody else, whether he or she has any national appeal or offers anything interesting by way of agenda and vision.
We can’t prove them, but we’re fairly confident about two things. First, if Bill Clinton or Barack Obama were president today, under current circumstances, either one would be cruising to reelection and would win handily (baring a nasty economic surprise). Second, if the GOP were facing a normal primary situation, in which a clear winner would eventually emerge and then unite the party behind him, he (or she) would cruise to victory over Joe Biden.
A third thing we know is that neither of these conditions is going to apply. The first is a fantasy, while the second seems like one. The difference between the two parties right now is that the Democrats will, in our estimation, do the next best thing by nominating the clown they think most resembles Clinton and Obama. The Republicans, by contrast, appear willing to destroy one another and their party in pursuit of…well…we’ll be damned if we know. In any case, the net effect will be the election of the clown and the transformation of Washington into an even bigger and more reckless clown show than it is now – or than it has ever been.
Time will tell of course, but if we’re right about this, then, well, ya got trouble.
