Democrats Must Destroy Democracy to Save Democracy

Following his abysmal performance in the first presidential debate and an embarrassing press conference where he called Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump” and Ukranian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy “President Putin,” Joe Biden is officially out of the presidential race.

It was curious seeing the flurry of calls from top Democratic Party brass for Biden to step aside come all at once and so late in the game. Honestly, I wonder what took them so long.

Biden’s flubs in his recent public appearances were similar to the ones he’s been making throughout his presidency. The only real distinction is that it’s an election year, voters are actually paying attention and Democrats are trailing in the polls.

In early June, more than three weeks before the debate, the Wall Street Journal detailed what many who have been paying attention witnessed daily on television over the last three-and-a-half years: Biden was slipping.

Much like Ron Burgundy in Anchorman, he would read anything you put on a teleprompter, including cues that aren’t meant to be read aloud – “repeat that line.” He speaks softly at times, makes awkward, pregnant pauses and, much like your grandpa, seemingly dozes off at any time of day.

Yet Biden’s campaign team and liberal talking heads in the media were quick to rebut the WSJ story — among the first mainstream sources to publicly and honestly diagnose the problem — when it came out.

“I’ll just say that it says a lot that the only people willing to make these false claims are Trump’s MAGA Republicans in Congress,” Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden’s re-election campaign manager, told CNN.

As the narrative about Biden’s mental acuity gained steam leading up to the WSJ’s report, his supporters were out in public claiming he is as “sharp as a tack,” dubbing the many videos circulating on social media of his repeated missteps as “cheap fakes.”

When the debate finally came and millions of Americans watched the president exhibit the mental decline everyone has been talking about, the house of cards finally came crashing down. Biden’s handlers could no longer prop up their Weekend at Bernie’s candidate.

Ever since, Democratic Party insiders and megadonors feverishly called for Biden to drop out of the race and, this weekend, they finally got their wish.

Perhaps the most amusing thing about all this dysfunction and chaos within the Democratic Party is what it really means in the context of the campaign they’ve waged against Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy, so it goes. This line has been repeated breathlessly ­– again, again and again – from the Biden campaign, members of Congress and media types for months.

To be clear, I’m no fan of Trump, but I don’t think a second Trump term poses any real threat to our democratic system. Hopefully he doesn’t make me eat those words one day. But there’s something particularly funny about ousting a democratically elected presidential nominee in order to “save democracy.”

Because it was clear that Biden couldn’t possibly win and his continued candidacy would hurt other Democrats down ticket at the state and federal levels, it became time to throw democracy aside. It no longer mattered that millions of Democratic voters across the country engaged in a democratic process to select Biden as the party nominee.

The writing was on the wall, and there simply wasn’t enough lipstick to make that pig pretty. So, the only course of action that remained was to push Biden out before it was too late. A new candidate had to emerge (Kamala?) before all hope was lost for November.

The Democrats’ façade of being “defenders of democracy” has never been more apparent than it is today. It’s not about democracy. It never was. It’s all about power.

(Full Disclosure: The Maine Wire is a project of the Maine Policy Institute, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that advocates for free market public policy solutions.)