I am a center-left Democrat. I believe that our American system of government runs best when it does so by consensus and compromise between responsible Democrats and Republicans. Of course, I despise and have publicly fought against far-right politics and politicians, but I am also critical of extremism on the left, especially when it leads to paralyzing divisions within the Democratic Party and among the voting public.
My favorite person in American history is Robert Kennedy, who, as U.S. Attorney General, was the nation’s greatest crimefighter with his relentless pursuit of the Mafia. I am also a die-hard Hillary Clinton supporter. In my opinion, despite her noble lifelong commitment to public service, she is one of the most gifted but tragic figures in American politics. She was a progressive First Lady from 1993 to 2001, a hard-working U.S. Senator—well known as “a workhorse, not a show horse”—from 2001 to 2009, and the admired and respected Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013 who was devoted and loyal to President Barack Obama who defeated her for the Presidential nomination in the 2008 Democratic primary.
In 2016, I mourned Secretary Clinton’s Electoral College loss to the corrupt and dishonest Donald Trump despite her significant victory in the national popular vote. I still firmly believe that FBI Director James Comey's misleading and unjust statements about Secretary Clinton, particularly those made in the final days before the election, were the primary reason for Trump's victory. To this day, Comey, now a major Trump critic, refuses to own that distinction.
Regardless, after her defeat and her legitimate grievances for that loss, she made the traditional concession phone call to Trump, followed by her gracious concession speech. She accepted defeat and paid her respects to the process by attending Trump’s inauguration.
In 2020—although I believed him to be the most outstanding Vice President in my lifetime because of his faithful service to President Obama, a great American President—I did not support Joe Biden during the Democratic primary. I thought that at 77 he was too old and not up to the task. I still held out hope for another Hillary Clinton candidacy, but the never-ending smear campaigns against her had taken their tolls, and the defamations were sadly fatal to her once-brilliant political career.
Representative Jim Clyburn (D-South Carolina) saved Biden’s floundering candidacy during the South Carolina primary on February 29, which led to his eventual nomination. In response, with Clyburn’s blessing, Biden selected Senator Kamala Harris (D-California) as his running mate.
To be sure, I was also not a fan of Senator Harris because of her poor performance during the 2018 hearings for Brett Kavanaugh's controversial nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, during which I played a minor role and independently worked with her staff. I was also angry over her open disrespect for Biden during the first primary debate when she essentially accused Biden of being a racist. Frankly, I was surprised that Biden selected her.
On March 15, 2020, the day of Biden’s one-on-one debate with Bernie Sanders, I wrote on my blog:
Tonight will tell us whether Biden is prepared for Donald Trump’s lying but withering attacks or whether we will face that same disappointment we all felt when Robert Mueller testified before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee last July. As all of us recall, Mueller engineered an extraordinary investigation and oversaw the preparation of a well-documented report, proving Trump’s corruption, which wound up getting sabotaged by Attorney General William Barr.
However—during his public testimony and to our chagrin—Mueller failed miserably in his lame attempt to defend the amazing work of his team of federal prosecutors.
Don’t get me wrong. If Biden were in a coma, he or anyone else who gets the Democratic nomination for president against Trump will receive my vote—regardless of whether it’s a flat-out win in the primaries or at a brokered convention. . . .
However, since my candidate, Hillary Clinton, is not in the running, I want to see the Democratic nominee take the fight to Trump—just like Hillary did throughout the 2016 campaign and particularly during her three debates with that reckless and malicious beneficiary of James Comey’s kindnesses.
I learned to love candidate Joe Biden during his aggressive and courageous campaign against Trump’s bid for a second term. Biden’s official election as U.S. President and his sound defeat of Trump on November 7—four days after the election—was one of the happiest days of my life.
During the campaign, I was pleased to read that Biden was representing that he would be a one-term President.
Biden claimed that he would seek bipartisanship to help solve our country’s most daunting problems, such as, among many other domestic and foreign issues, 1) a significant effort to pass legislation authorizing the reconstruction of our nation’s infrastructure, and 2) to secure the continued survival of NATO, which Trump had placed at risk because of his inexplicable love affair with the murderous Vladimir Putin.
In the aftermath of the first Biden-Trump debate on September 29, 2020, I wrote:
Down went Trump, who made a complete and total fool of himself tonight. . . . A slow and deliberate Joe Biden, who rose to the occasion, rightly described Trump in front of an international television audience as a “clown” and a “liar.” And Trump, who lied from beginning to end, proved it.
After the second and final debate on October 22, I wrote:
The first 45 minutes of tonight’s debate were somewhat fuzzy and meandering. Then, when the issue of healthcare was brought up, the evening came to life. And Biden rose to the occasion [again] and buried Trump on that subject in the defining exchange of the debate, indicating that, in the midst of a pandemic, Trump’s blatant sabotage of America’s healthcare system, aka ObamaCare, should disqualify him from reelection.
Meantime, Trump’s repeated lies and baseless smears soared while Biden’s good-guy reputation and noble character were obvious. . . . Clear advantage to Biden.
However, like millions of others, I was appalled by Trump’s bad behavior in the aftermath of his defeat on November 3 with his false and misleading claims of a rigged election—which, without any legitimate evidence, were rejected in sixty court cases, some decided by judges who were Trump nominees.
Contrary to Hillary Clinton’s class and dignity in the aftermath of her defeat, Trump made no concession call to Biden and gave no concession speech. And he later cowardly and shamelessly fled from Washington on the morning of President Biden’s inauguration which he refused to attend.
In the months that followed, Trump continued his campaign of provable lies about the election while his base inexplicably rallied around him in increasing numbers.
During the interim, Trump’s irresponsible and unforgivable role in The Capitol Insurrection was and continues to be a national disgrace and embarrassment. A second Trump impeachment by the U.S. House for “incitement of insurrection” on January 13, 2021, went to a U.S. Senate trial where a bipartisan majority verdict fell short of the required two-thirds vote on February 13. The widely praised lead prosecutor for the U.S. House was Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland).
From the outset of his tenure, Biden’s noble efforts were obstructed and sabotaged by Fox News and the disgraced ex-President, who, while escalating his lies about the 2020 election, announced his candidacy for President on November 15, 2022—a week after Trump-endorsed candidates performed poorly in the mid-term elections in which the Democrats kept control of the U.S. Senate and closed the gap on the GOP’s control of the U.S. House.
On April 25, 2023, Biden announced his bid for reelection, keeping Kamala Harris as his running mate—even though many of us believed that he represented in 2020 that he would be a healing one-term President who would help pave the way for the next generation of American leaders and then step down, rejecting a bid for a second term.
Along with many others, I was unhappy with Biden’s decision. Bobby Kennedy Jr.—an anti-vax crusader and prodigious conspiracy theorist who believes that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill his father—announced his intention to challenge Biden in the Democratic primary on April 19, 2023. However, receiving little support from the Democrats, RFK Jr. announced his intention to run as an independent on September 9, 2023.
The real impact of RFK Jr’s candidacy has yet to be determined.
Throughout Biden’s first term, many of us expressed concerns about his halting speech and his robotic walk. Fox News routinely made major issues of these moments, taunting and undermining the President by running 24-7 loop recordings of his slurred speech and stiff gait, along with a variety of embarrassing moments of confusion.
Many suspected that the recognition of these obvious problems by the White House had been the real reason for the decision to reject the traditional invitation by the hosting network to the sitting President for an interview during the Super Bowl on February 11.
Notably, the respected columnist David Ignatius of the Washington Post published a story that was critical of the Biden team for passing on this golden opportunity for the President to appear before millions of voters. Ignatius made no secret of his suspicion that Biden, now 81, was in decline, mentally and physically.
As President Biden’s 2024 State of the Union Address approached, the mainstream media—mindful of the President’s decision about the Super Bowl—appeared to set a low bar of success for Biden, who, with the help of a teleprompter that all Presidents use, did meet those low expectations. And, because of some of his off-script comments, the President even exceeded some of them. The President was widely praised in the aftermath of his performance, including by me.
However, on March 8, the morning after Biden’s speech, I posted a statement at 8:26 A.M.
President Biden had a wonderful night, and he has been one of our greatest one-term Presidents. But, if we are going to effectively fight to preserve American Democracy, then Joe has to go, just like Lyndon Johnson on March 31, 1968. There will be plenty of time to select our new leader. The Democrats just have to make sure that they don't self-destruct at their summer convention--as they did in 1968. The result back then was Richard Nixon. . . .
In short, I don’t think the Joe Biden of 2024 is up to a ferocious political campaign against a corrupt and dishonest streetfighter who breaks all the rules and lies about everything. If Trump loses this election, he will also lose most, if not all, of his fortune, as well as his personal freedom. That is real motivation for Trump to scour the bottom of the barrel in order to win. And I do not believe that Biden, whom I admire and respect, is prepared to strap on the armor and do battle with what is about to come at him.
Five days after his speech to the nation, the DNC declared the Biden-Harris ticket as its presumptive nominee.
Then, after watching the debate in horror on Thursday night, June 27, I reposted my admonition, doubling down on what I had written.
What needs to happen. . . .
* In the aftermath of the disastrous June 27 debate, Fox News—aka Trump State Television, acting again as Trump’s surrogate—is going to bombard President Biden both day and night until the November election or until he leaves office. If the President hides in the White House, he will be smoked out even by the mainstream media doing their jobs as journalists. A bunker mentality will do nothing more than guarantee that the President will lose the election.
* President Biden is holding a very weak hand. But the President is a noble man of honor, a genuine patriot, and a great one-term President. I can only assume that he does not want to be responsible and remembered for losing the November election to a corrupt and violent seditionist who attempted to overthrow the United States Government after Biden legitimately defeated him in 2020.
* Sadly, President Biden is not going to get better to fight another day, and, thus, he clearly cannot defeat the horribly flawed Trump, a convicted criminal—which is a disaster not just for the Democrats but for the United States and the world.
* The problem is that President Biden and Vice President Harris have already earned the Democratic Party nomination. Staffing appointments for the reelection campaign have been created, and money has been raised in the name of the Biden-Harris campaign.
* Moving forward, this must be handled delicately with minimal chaos. By already possessing enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination for reelection, the President has to jump and not be pushed. He must be treated with the great respect he deserves for his remarkable accomplishments while repairing the incredible damage Trump inflicted on America during his four years in office.
* If President Biden insists that he will not surrender the nomination, then the only option is a bloody battle among the leadership and rank-and-file of the Democratic Party. I don’t think that any Democrat wants that, especially not Joe Biden.
* If a test or measurement is needed to determine whether the President just had “a bad night” last Thursday, then give him an opportunity to prove his ability to fight back by holding a traditional free-wheeling, no-holds-barred 90-minute press conference without a teleprompter. If he survives that test—and I no longer believe that he can—then some reconsideration is warranted.
* Consequently, President Biden not only has to withdraw as a candidate for reelection, but he also must resign as President as soon as possible and enthusiastically embrace Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor and the 47th President of the United States. Over the past two years, in my opinion, the Vice President has performed admirably and professionally. She is well qualified to be a great President.
* However, the right-wing media has not sparred Vice President Harris. She, too, has been recklessly and maliciously smeared by Fox “and friends,” along with the MAGA Republicans in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate.
* As President, Kamala Harris will continue the work of her partner, Joe Biden, and his administration with everything and everyone still in place after ex-President Biden leaves the stage. They won’t even need new office furniture.
* With the world’s spotlight on her between now and November, President Harris will rise to the occasion and experience redemption and vindication. She will receive popular support and be loved by the same voters who loved President Biden. As an experienced prosecutor, the former Attorney General of California, and an ex-U.S. Senator, President Harris will promote the great victories of the Biden-Harris Administration and be her own best advocate in this new role.
* With regard to the Democratic nominee for President and for the sake of good order, Vice President Harris must receive the first right of refusal. It is the quickest and easiest path of least resistance.
* At the moment, Vice President Harris is trailing Trump in a hypothetical race by 6.6 percentage points, according to RealClearPolling. . . . Trust me, that will change dramatically in the coming months. More than at any other election, millions of voters who have nothing but disdain for Donald Trump just want a credible and responsible alternative. And anyone who insists that the American public will not vote for a black woman for President is most likely just another Trump-loving bigot.
* To those Democrats who say "no" to Kamala—because they want other wonderful Democratic leaders, like governors Wes Moore (Maryland) Gavin Newsom (California), Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan), and Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania), among many others—you are risking a civil war within the Democratic Party. All of these great Democrats represent the future. But the future is not now. America is in a major crisis, and we need a quick and easy fix to solve the problem.
Kamala Harris is that fix.
* The hundreds of millions of dollars already collected on behalf of the Biden-Harris campaign will be used by President Harris for her campaign. Try to bring in someone new and raise that kind of money in the short time remaining before the November election.
* President Harris and her advisors will nominate her own Vice President who will serve for the remainder of the Biden-Harris term while seeking retention as President Harris’s running mate. To be clear, President Harris’s Vice President-designate will require a majority vote in both houses of Congress for confirmation. And that series of hearings will, no doubt, be a combat zone.
* The 2024 DNC Convention in Chicago—56 years after the disastrous 1968 convention—will celebrate the successes of the Biden-Harris presidencies, along with the future stars of the Democratic Party. Meantime, the key for the Democrats is to prevent self-destruction before the November election. If that happens, the forces of darkness will win without much of a fight.
* The one thing we have working in our favor is that the Trump-MAGA crowd and the gang at Fox News—who have been spiking the football and dancing in the end zone since the night of the debate—will overplay their winning hands.
Dan - well said! This has to be your best work ever. Thank you for saying what the American people need to know & understand.
Dan: You are right on target. I wish you were in politics! My second choice would be that you send THIS article to every media in D.C., including the White House! Please!