Writer Greil Marcus on Substack. July 2024:
In the first couple of minutes, Biden seemed so barely there, confused, and unable to finish a thought—there never was a coherent argument—I couldn’t see how he could recover. He didn’t. When he said “We beat Medicare” I knew the hole was deeper than I’d ever imagined. Sure, he meant “We solved the Medicare funding problem, opened it up to negotiating drug prices, lowered the insulin premium,” but he threw it right into Trump’s wheelhouse and he predictably hit it out of the park.
I think the story is now set in stone. Trump’s support is a mile wide and a mile deep. The ‘Save Democracy’ banner is meaningless on his side. As I’ve argued before, I don’t think support for democratic government or democratic political culture has amounted to more than 65 percent of the country in our history, often it’s been far less, and it’s far less now. Many people don’t want the burden of democratic choice, they don’t want more people included in the polity rather than fewer, they don’t want the far more free America we have now than before, they want someone to tell them what to do, what to think, how it’s going to be, and get out of the way. Biden’s support was, I believe, somewhat wider and far more shallow. I don’t believe he can continue as a credible candidate. Harris can’t be thrown overboard. It would confirm that she was never more than window dressing. It’s Biden’s fault that she was buried in the administration when she should have been built up.
Biden could withdraw on the simple basis that “I care more about the country than myself,” endorse Harris as ‘my personal choice,’ and call for an open convention. Other than Harris no possible nominee is well known or fixed in the minds of most of the electorate. Which allows for self-definition and a new story. A well handled convention—dream on, with the pro-Hamas demonstrations guaranteed to disrupt it from inside and out—with an interesting, dynamic, well-why-not nominee—Whitmer, Shapiro, Warnock, Pritzker, Tester, Klobuchar—could come out of the convention with a flood of enthusiasm that could possibly be sustained or even built upon. And a strong candidate, even if they lose, could help protect the Senate, which will be the only check remaining if Trump reclaims power.
—I wrote this soon after the June debate. Biden just dropped out, which I didn’t think he would. Though Dean Phillips’s he’s-too-old-he-can’t-win campaign looked silly by the end, he couldn’t have been more predictive: and since he never considered himself a serious alternative, but was trying to open the field, brave. At the moment it looks as if party names are rallying around Harris. It’s too late to gin up a Draft Whitmer-Shapiro-Pritzger-Kelly-Beshear movement; someone would have to step out and say they have a better chance of beating Trump and here’s why. As I said above, a candidate who is undefined can define themselves, and Harris is defined. Although a friend came up with a campaign slogan today: PROSECUTOR VERSUS FELON. Which Amy Klobuchar could run with too.
