DAVID MARCUS: Is Biden rooting for his vice president, or his legacy?
On Tuesday, as Vice President Kamala Harris was attempting to send a message of unity with her speech in Washington, the sitting president, Joe Biden - you remember him - called half the population of the United States of America "garbage" live on television, stealing the show.
This is not the first occasion on which Scranton Joe has rained on San Francisco Kamala's parade. Several times he has scheduled press conferences for exactly when Kamala is delivering an important speech. It is also notable that every time she tries to distance herself from his abysmal record, he all but posts a selfie of the two of them, side by side in the Oval Office.
It all leads to a rather uncomfortable question. Does Joe Biden want Kamala Harris to lose?
If the average human being puts themselves in Biden’s shoes, the answer kinda has to be yes. If you were deposed from whatever you do by Nancy Pelosi and replaced with a cackling empty pantsuit, wouldn’t you want that endeavor to fail?
Biden is a northeast Democrat with moderate tendencies. Sure, he has governed as a far-left lunatic for the last four years, but that isn’t really who he is. And this patina of centrism is what got him elected in the first place.
Now, he has been ousted by San Francisco liberal Nancy Pelosi, replaced with San Francisco liberal Kamala Harris and, if she loses, the most likely next Democratic Party nominee is California governor Gavin Newsom. Three guesses where he’s from.
The point here is that a Harris win will almost certainly push the Democratic Party irrevocably to the left. Biden would no more pack the Supreme Court than he would pass on an ice cream cone. A President Harris absolutely will load up the highest court in the land with legal lefties given the chance.
Thus far, the most shocking moment of the presidential race, since the conventions, was the International Brotherhood of Teamsters internal polling that showed Biden with a 10-point lead over Trump and Harris with a double-digit deficit.
Twenty-point swings in politics are like perfect games in baseball. They happen, but not often. Imagine being Biden seeing those polls, and then a month later watching his replacement’s campaign flame out like the Hindenburg.
Oh the humanity!
Last week, GOP nominee Donald Trump said he was open to pardoning Hunter Biden, "despite what they’ve done to me." Perhaps he was trolling, perhaps not.
Shakespeare wrote that "Trifles light as air are to the jealous confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ." But not only does Biden, a mere mortal man, have a right to be jealous, he is at the precipice of an election result that could confirm his ouster was a huge mistake.
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Biden is and always will be the 46th president of the United States, a proud Irishman of humble origins who rose to our nation’s greatest office in a lifetime blessed with triumph and cursed with tragedy.
How he is remembered as president very much depends on what happens next Tuesday. If Harris wins, then he really was just a placeholder, a bridge constructed by the party of Barack Obama. But if Harris loses? Then Biden’s presidency looks very different.
Biden was elected to restore normalcy. Even if he abandoned his moderate instincts, he was elected, unlike Harris, by Democratic voters because he was the most centrist candidate in the 2020 primary.
Biden’s vision for the Democratic Party is very different from that of Harris, and if Harris loses, then it might allow a northeast Democrat like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, or dare I say the, of late, quite sensible Sen. John Fetterman to challenge Pelosi’s San Francisco hegemony.
Who knows what lies in the hearts of men? Maybe Biden is rooting for Harris as hard as Rudy Giuliani is rooting for the Yankees, but neither situation is going well.
It is impossible to know if Biden is intentionally trying to sabotage his own vice president, but he is as savvy a political player as they come, mental decline or not. His legacy is on the line, and quite frankly, it looks a lot better if she loses.