Should apparent efforts to replace the president atop the Democrat ticket be taken seriously?
It seems it’s the season for half-hearted coups.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner private military company’s all-but-official chief executive, was said to have pledged his dependence, his loyalty, to Russian President Vladimir Putin ahead of July 4. This according to the Kremlin.
Outside the Russian Federation and its auspices, the media narrative is that Prigozhin is not friend to Putin, but foe. An ex-chef, Russia’s violent answer to Anthony Bourdain is said to be a man on the bleeding edge of Eastern politics, perhaps even a man who came within a hair of taking Putin’s place last month. We don’t know.
Nearer the Russian River Valley, a similar-enough political dynamic has taken hold: a seeming succession, stalled in a holding pattern. The favorite son of San Francisco, Governor Gavin Newsom, pledged loyalty to his party’s primogeniture.
“I’ve told everyone in the White House, from the chief of staff to the first lady,” California’s chief executive said after Biden’s surprising electoral overperformance last November. “I’m all in, count me in.”
Replacing Biden with Newsom, the face of the most unadulterated form of modern liberalism—California progressivism—would be a bit like swapping Putin for Prigozhin, the Russian hawk of hawks. What the Wagner chieftain lacks in looks, he makes up with superior capacity for aggression.
This a column that is “short” on the efforts, such as they are, to replace President Biden in the Democratic fold. Though he has entered his ayatollah decade, the sitting president is likely to be his party’s nominee in 2024, no matter what maneuvers appear to be happening behind the scenes.
As in the 2019-2020 primary, Biden is again abjectly underrated. Though the Democrats are doubtless a machine, the president is atop that machinery, even if a frightened conductor. The biggest secret going is that Joe Biden is the most powerful man in the world.
Only Joe Biden, or a spectacular twist of fate, can dislodge Joe Biden from the commanding heights of his party. I read once that Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi, who the president feted in Washington in June, got his first job in the Bharatiya Janata Party by doing whatever he was told. Biden’s oeuvre has been much the same. Biden has survived in electoral politics long past other men, particularly other white men, in his party, by doing what he is told and going where he is sent.
What that looked like began to transform at the end of last decade. Biden had become a form of himself many didn’t recognize. This new Biden was written off as merely senile—though, in the American gerontocracy, what is senile? More accurate and charitable, the Biden of 2019-2020 was: withdrawn; careful; more frightened of a world he understood less intuitively (most everyone he had ever known was dead); but at the same, he was less nervous.
“You don’t have to do this, Joe,” Barack Obama reportedly told his ex-lieutenant about a 2020 run. The former vice president, accused of plagiarism back in the day, essentially replied by cribbing a line from his frenemy former boss: Yes, we can.
Four years later, the situation, at least in terms of his own party’s politics, is so much unchanged, even if Biden’s personal situation is worse.
I tuned into the president’s interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria last week. It was awful; he is getting unwatchable. I say this as a longtime appreciator of the man’s talents. The underrated fluidity and verve that Biden could exhibit in the last primary, or when he bravely withdrew America from Afghanistan (thoug
