Dems' Insane Plan B: Help Us, Taylor Swift, You're Our Only Hope

Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP

Will "Sparks Fly" if Democrats "Begin Again" for their presidential nomination? Maybe they "should've said no" to Joe Biden in 2023 and opened up their primary from the beginning. With the Democrat cover-up of Biden's cognitive incapacity collapsing by the hour, Democrats and the media have finally realized that "everything has changed" since Biden's disastrous presidential-debate performance.

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It's too late to go "back to December" now, but Democrats plan to give it a try. If they can succeed in the "delicate" task of convincing Biden to withdraw, Semafor reports, Democrats have cooked up a plan for a so-called blitz primary, in which delegates will choose six alternate nominees, who will then compete for the nomination, which will be settled at the convention. 

Are you "ready for it"? Here's the insane plan, along with the insane take-away:

  • Biden would step down as the Democratic nominee in mid-July, and announce the new system, with backing from Vice President Kamala Harris.
  • Potential candidates would have a few days to throw their respective hats in the ring. The Democratic Party then would begin a primary sprint in which the six candidates who receive the most votes from delegates pledge to run positive-only campaigns in the month leading up to the convention.
  • The “blitz primary” would involve weekly forums with each candidate moderated by cultural icons (Michelle Obama, Oprah, and Taylor Swift are among the names floated in the memo) in order to engage voters.
  • The nominee would ultimately be chosen by the delegates using ranked choice voting before the start of the Chicago convention on Aug. 19.
  • It would be announced with plenty of fanfare on the third day of the gathering. The memo imagines the nominee unveiled on stage with Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

According to its authors, the country would be captivated. Donations would pour in. And Biden would be celebrated as a “modern-day George Washington,” the proponents argue.

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Where to start? Let's begin at the end. Only a delusional and desperate party hack would consider a Biden withdrawal under these conditions analogous to George Washington, let alone Cincinnatus. Washington could have set himself up as king, but refused in order to set the precedent for limited power. If Biden withdraws -- and this plan won't even get launched unless he does -- it will be under pressure from his own party over his incompetence. It won't be a selfless act; Biden withdrawing before the primaries could have been spun like that. Now, however, Biden would only be leaving because his party abandoned him after Biden made clear he was no longer cognitively competent. 

The expectations about donors seems equally disconnected from reality. Donations may pour in, but a lot of that cash will get burned by six candidates who will need to raise funds quickly for a primary, not a general election. Voters will undoubtedly be angry that their primary votes ultimately turned out to be meaningless, and angry voters don't open their wallets. All this will likely do is to dilute fundraising for the general election, when Democrats all the way down the ballot will need it most. 

What about the process? The nation might be captivated, but people get 'captivated' at car accidents and trainwrecks, too. It does sound like a Blogger Feeding Program, so I'm not necessarily complaining, but Democrats seem to have overlooked the fact that this process basically has the candidates engaging the party, and not the voters. Convention delegates are overwhelmingly comprised of party officials and insiders from the local and state levels, after all, and not just a random slice of the primary electorate. 

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Televising the smoke-filled backroom does not make it democratic. It's been a century or so since either major party used a convention process to name a presidential nominee rather than primaries, the accepted small-D democratic process. 

Next, consider what the delegates will unleash in this process. Biden won the nomination in 2020 to put off an internecine power fight between Democrat establishmentarians, ie the Clintonistas, and the progressive Left. Biden put Kamala Harris on the ticket to marry the two major factions and to promise the progressives that their ascent to power was coming. Democrats covered up Biden's decline to avoid having that fight erupt in the primaries this cycle. Now, not only will that fight erupt, the rushed process used will only serve to rip open the wounds between those factions rather than to settle the question of which faction emerges as legitimate leadership.

Democrats couldn't have possibly made that bad situation any worse than by choosing ranked-choice voting as their process. It's the least transparent process, in the first place, and is completely inappropriate for public conventions. A series of run-off rounds in the case of no one winning a majority would at least have allowed the factions to negotiate alliances. In this situation, where the party has wrested any real choice away from its voters, RCV is perhaps the biggest thumb in the eye to primary participants now forced to the sidelines while settling nothing at all.

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But the insanity reaches its zenith -- or nadir, YMMV -- in suggesting that Taylor Swift should moderate its candidate forum. Why? Are Democrats that desperate to be seen as "cool," or just that disconnected from the seriousness of the situation at hand? Both, it seems. Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama are poor choices as well, but at least they're both politics-adjacent. Winfrey has years of experience in talk-show formats, but not in moderating debates; Mrs. Obama doesn't even have that background. But Taylor Swift is a pop singer. What makes anyone think that Swift could moderate a debate between six ambitious Democrats seeking the highest office in the land?

Is this a nominating process or The Voice? Do Democrats want to win an election or an Emmy?

And consider why Democrats are concocting this ridiculous 'blitz primary.' They don't want Kamala Harris as the nominee; there is no other explanation. If Biden withdraws, the simplest and easiest move would be to endorse the sitting VP and aleady-named running mate as the presidential nominee. All of the effort going into this planning is a measure of just how much panic is emerging among Dems about the prospect of Harris' candidacy against Donald Trump. Don't think for a second that all of the identitarian activists in the party won't recognize that, and don't think for a moment that they will let it slide quietly, either -- not in your "wildest dreams." 

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"Is it over now," you may be wondering? It's certainly "Karma." 

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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David Strom 11:20 AM | November 21, 2024
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