Shorting Biden
18th August 2021
ZMan reads the tea leaves.
Way back when the Democratic Party stepped into to halt their voters from picking the wrong option, the immediate response from most observers was that Biden would be a caretaker president if he won. Most people, of course, assumed a man with serious cognitive decline was never going to win election, but 2020 was a good reminder that authoritarian regimes have no respect for the general will. Biden was installed as the short-term answer to their Trump problem.
How long he lasted was assumed to be a function of his ability to stand up and read the lines provided by the script writers. The “long Biden” camp said he would serve out his term, but not run for re-election. Harris or maybe someone else would be the nominee for 2024 with his blessing. The “short-Biden” camp said he would be lucky to make it to the midterm. His cognitive decline would become so obvious that he would be forced out one way or another and Harris would take over.
There was always another element to the politics that was pushed to the background in the excitement to depose Trump. The left-liberals have not been unified in a long time and the Biden-Harris ticket was a compromise between the two main factions. The one faction is the Obama side. If you look at the people around Biden in his campaign and his White House, they are mostly Obama loyalists. On the other hand, Harris was surrounded by Clinton people and remains so as VP.