Publishing — whether print or pixels — is a business, and needs readers, so they create crime waves, do stories on politicians (the more obnoxious, the better), and run pieces by pundits (the more idiotic, the better).
I do it, too, by leaving up Steve’s utterly ridiculous satirical piece about Obama Michelle having been born as a boy named Michael Robinson, which gets 10 times as many views as all the other content on this blog combined, because it sucks unsuspecting Obama-haters into my liberal-slanted news and opinion. (Most of them quickly leave.) I don’t get paid for this, but I wouldn’t bother if there were no readers.
The Hill is a generally good, factually reliable, news source that covers Washington D.C. politics. (Read about its origins here.) I use it a lot as a story source (in this age of slimmed-down newsrooms, there aren’t that many good ones).
I honestly don’t understand why this ran this piece. Opinion diversity, maybe. Be forewarned: The writer, Douglas MacKinnon, is
“a political and communications consultant, was a writer in the White House for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and former special assistant for policy and communications at the Pentagon during the last three years of the Bush administration.”
I’m automatically going to be suspicious of anyone with this resume. But I was unprepared for the vacuity of this shred of punditry; and when I read it, I wondered if it was another “Michelle Obama was born Michael Robinson” type of spoof.
However, The Hill isn’t as hard up for readers as Steve was, before his untimely death from Covid-19 in March 2020, so I can’t explain why they ran this piece — even on a slow-news weekend.
I’ll cut to the chase. MacKinnon’s central idea is that Biden and Harris are unpopular, so to help the Democrats win in 2024, he thinks Biden should fire Harris, replace her with California Gov. Gavin Newsom — who’s more popular than either of them — then resign, making Newsom president.
This is nuts. An idea that could only come from a Republican who, one surmises, is a pundit for lack of other work opportunities. But before I shred his stupid idea, it may be helpful to trying shedding some light on how someone might come up with it. The answer is a very distorted view of the world (or at least U.S.) as it actually is.
About the 2022 “red wave” failure to materialize, MacKinnon wrote,
“I believe one of the main reasons is ‘Trump fatigue’ and even hatred for former President Trump. As long as he is still considered a potentially viable candidate for 2024, or a political force by the left, that fatigue and hate will be enough to drive many Americans to the polls to vote against any Republican.”
This is completely wrong. Democrats’ feelings toward Trump aren’t hatred, but fear. He scares the crap out of them. And the reason many Americans won’t vote for any Republican is because they don’t trust them to respect our fundamental rights. Plus, an awful lot of them are liars. MacKinnon continued,
“I have written that I don’t believe Trump will run but will drag out the anticipation for as long as possible to keep his ‘brand’ in the news and the campaign donations flowing in.”
Unless The Hill and virtually every other news organization is being lied to by their sources, Trump is going to prove him wrong on this point, possibly just two days from now. My own opinion is Trump can’t not run, because Trump is Trump.
This man’s ego is too large, and too needy, to voluntarily bow out of anything. Nor is he inclined to make things easier for the liberal activists spending time, effort, and money to have the courts declare him an insurrectionist and bar him from the ballot. MacKinnon also is presumptuous about future history. He wrote,
“Do Democrats jettison both Biden and Harris or keep them and more than likely lose to a strong Republican ticket of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and, perhaps, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley?”
The answer is we don’t know if a Biden-Harris ticket would beat a DeSantis-Haley ticket in 2024, but on a purely conjectural basis, it’s certainly possible. They may love DeSantis in Florida, in no small part due to his no lockdown-no masks Covid-19 policies, but Florida had three times Washington’s Covid-19 death rate, and not everyone is going to vote for more graves.
Also, spending taxpayer money to fly legal Venezuelan immigrants from Texas to Massachusetts (at $130,000 per nose) to make a point about the Mexican border may play well with idiot voters in Florida, but might not be exportable to other states. It’s dumb to simplistically assume DeSantis would play well nationally (see article here).
MacKinnon thinks the Democratic Party needs a white knight to “save it from the Biden-Harris dilemma it is surely about to face,” and has decided to appoint Newsom to that role. He assumes Biden and Harris are unelectable, overlooking the fact they were elected in 2020.
Also, there’s already a process in place for appointing the Democratic Party’s knights: Primaries and caucuses. If Democratic voters want to replace Biden and Harris, they’ll do it themselves, not leave it to a former Reagan-Bush speechwriter.
This, of course, sets the stage for exposing the principal flaw of MacKinnon’s thinking: The idea of appointing a president. This notion could only come from a Republican, and starkly illustrates how Republicans think. After losing the popular vote in six of the last seven (or is it seven of the last eight?) presidential elections, the GOP went into the 2022 midterms committed to the idea that voters would never again be allowed to choose a president if they could help it.
This helps explain why they were shellacked in the just-concluded midterms. Taking away abortion rights, in the most medieval fashion possible, also contributed as it left voters wondering what other rights Republicans would confiscate if they were given the chance.
Voters elected Biden, not Newsom. The idea of an appointed president is repulsive. (Hence the public revulsion at GOP backing of Trump’s attempt to appoint himself to another term, despite losing the popular and electoral votes.) It also has a strong flavor of fraud, of the bait-and-switch variety. A stunt like this would virtually guarantee Newsom would take a shellacking from any Republican nominee. (Which may be why MacKinnon, a Republican operative, is suggesting it.)
Now, it’s true that Nixon appointed Gerald Ford in precisely this fashion. But that was different; 1974 and 2022 aren’t parallel. Biden and Harris aren’t a Nixon and Agnew; while Americans are unhappy about inflation and gas prices, they’re not inflamed by an unpopular Vietnam War or a corrupt president and vice president. And as innocuous as he was, voters didn’t like the idea of an appointed president, and replaced Ford with Carter in the 1976 election.
Newsom would be what Ford was — a caretaker president until the next election. MacKinnon probably isn’t the only Republican yearning for this. But Biden is very much a governing president, there’s no great scandal at present (as there was in 1974) that calls for a caretaker until a president can be elected, and Newsom isn’t a caretaker-type anyway — he’s no Gerald Ford. He might make a highly productive president, if he has the backing of a public that elected him to the job. But being elected is the only way he could be effective in office.
Much as MacKinnon may dislike the idea, Biden is president until January 20, 2025. From January 2017 to January 2021, Democrats were in the same boat. They could hope Trump would resign, die of Covid-19, or be removed from office; but the fact is, a president’s term is four years despite all the wishful thinking of the approximately one-half of the country that loathes him.
Republicans will get their run at Biden in November 2024. If they don’t want Biden and Harris staying for another four years, instead of dwelling on cockamamie schemes to remove them, they should turn their energies to thinking about giving voters a slate of Republican candidates normal people can vote for.
By the way, in closing, I seriously doubt that Democrats are going to take political strategy advice from a Republican operative who wants their elected Democratic president and vice president out of office.