No, no, no, I’m not suggesting it!
But could it actually happen that Democrats nominate her?
Journalist Joe Concha, writing for The Hill (here), speculates they might; I’m unsure whether he’s saying that tongue-in-cheek.
He assumes Biden won’t run for a second term (even though he’s said he will).
And, he argues, the Democrats don’t have a deep bench. Actually, they do, but they’re all on the injured list:
“Vice President Harris? She’s at 28 percent approval …. Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo? No longer governor and thoroughly disgraced. Gov. Gavin Newsom …? He had to spend major time and resources just to avoid being ousted in deep-blue California during a recall election earlier this year.”
With approval ratings worse than Trump’s, Harris don’t look real viable right now, although there’s still time. But people who work for her are quitting, suggesting her problems go deeper than polling numbers.
Cuomo’s fall from grace simply removes a big-state governor (some would say dictator) from the mix. The Democrats didn’t really need him. They could use a JFK, and he wasn’t one.
Neither is Newsom. Actually, the recall was just a blip. It’s easy to get a recall on California’s ballot, so rightwingers did. They were crushed at the polls; Newsom won by 61% (details here). Defeating it took no resources away from whatever happens in 2024; political donations re-sprout like mushrooms after a rain.
But I have other reasons for not liking Newsom as a potential 2024 nominee. Kimberly Guilfoyle (bio here) is one of them; he had the bad judgment to marry her. Yes, they’re divorced now (and she’s dating Don Trump Jr.), but what was he thinking? And he’s from California; that doesn’t play well with heartland voters, unless you’re Ronald Reagan, which he’s not.
Concho drops some other names:
“Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg? Not even 40 years old, and he has a supply chain crisis on his résumé. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)? Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)? Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.)?”
Except for Buttigieg, he doesn’t debunk them, but just assumes they’re not viable either. (“Cory Booker?” * snicker *) Maybe because all ran in 2020, and none rose to the top of the milk pitcher, so they must not be the cream. But all of this is to set you up for his curve ball:
“If those are the options, why not Hillary? She’s 74 years old, which is like being bathed in the fountain of youth compared to Biden. And she’s still stunned — five years later — that she actually lost to Donald Trump. In fact, she sounds no different than Trump in constantly complaining about all the reasons she lost and that, well, the election was stolen by Trump and the Russians anyway.”
Clearly, he’s not serious when he says “why not Hillary?”. Especially as he clearly hates the idea. There may be valid reasons to do journalism on whether she might consider running again, but a reporter covering a story doesn’t throw acerbic snark like that into his reportage. That’s fulminating, not reporting; by accusing her of conducting a “five-year public therapy session in broad daylight” (he repeats “five years” no less than four times!), he’s indulging in one of his own.
For the record, I don’t think she’d consider running again, even if there’s a vacuum in the Democratic field in 2024. Even if she did, having lost to Trump, a ton of Democratic primary voters would deathly fear her losing to him again, so it’s unlikely she’d prevail in the primaries.
There won’t be a vacuum. Nature abhors vacuums and fills them. And the brutal presidential winnowing process eliminates weak candidates in the early primaries; they simply can’t raise money to stay in the race when potential backers see they won’t make it and decline to throw away their money on a lost cause.
And on the flip side, a candidate with voter appeal can come out of the woodwork and rise very quickly: Buttigieg was only the mayor of a small city in a deep-red state, yet he captivated his party and became a serious contender. Obama was an obscure state senator in 2004, who had lost a Democratic primary for a U.S. House seat in 2000, when he electrified the Democratic convention with a keynote speech that propelled him into the White House in the next election cycle.
Both these guys had voter appeal in spades. Who’s to say someone like that won’t emerge in 2024 if Biden doesn’t run? (Or even if he does?)
All of this, of course, takes place in the broader context of our two-party system. Most Americans have chosen sides, and won’t vote for the other party under any circumstances. What Concha overlooks, when he disses on Kamala Harris, is that no Democratic voter will vote for Trump because she’s the nominee, no matter how much she or he dislikes her.
With the country evenly divided, swing voters decide elections; or sometimes a mass emigration of a significant voter bloc can sink a candidate, as blue-collar white males (many of whom had voted for Obama) did to Hillary in 2016, and suburban women did to Trump in 2020.
All of this will be weighed by Democratic hopefuls and strategists as the 2024 primaries draw nearer. As far as I can tell, Republicans won’t weigh anything; there’s no thinking going on anywhere in that party. Instead, they’re following a messiah, although it’s not a given he’ll be in the 2024 picture, either.
That will be the 19th presidential election of my lifetime. I don’t remember the first one, and didn’t understand what was going on in the next two, but I have clear recollections of 15 such elections. And what I’ve learned from them is that presidential elections are above all unpredictable. In presidential politics, three years is a long time.
Biden and Trump could both be gone by then. Or the political dynamics could have changed drastically, in such a way that America is seeking a different kind of leader? (For example, a forceful war president, if Russia has invaded Ukraine, and China has invaded Taiwan, starting World War 3?) Who would’ve guessed, in December 2019, that in March 2020 America would be gripped by a terrifying pandemic, and its economy would be entering a depression? A lot can happen between now and the 2024 primaries, and something probably will. Something always does.
So, Concha’s article seems to be a Washington-watcher just getting Hillary’s recent public appearances off his chest. Clearly, she rankles him. And because covering politics is his job, it’s hard for him to ignore her. For the rest of us, that comes easy. I don’t even think about her, and I doubt very many other ordinary citizen-voters do, either. You don’t have to be a Trumper to shove her out of mind and turn your attention to what comes after Biden’s first term. Whatever that is, I very much doubt it’ll be named “Hillary.”
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No, no, no, I’m not suggesting it!