An Open Convention Is Still The Best Move

Even and especially for Kamala Harris.

The overwhelming likelihood now is that the party coalesces around Kamala Harris and treats the upcoming convention as a love pageant to introduce her to the country. Before this transitions from “overwhelming likelihood” to “certainty” though, I’m just going to make the case for why I think it’s a bad idea, and why a better plan would be to stage something that at least looks like a contest.

It has very little to do with Kamala Harris herself. Harris will be the most progressive nominee in my lifetime. To the extent that I have reservations about her, they are not substantive. She can be a little goofy on camera sometimes, she’s never demonstrated any great talent for campaigning, and having a Californian at the top of the ticket buys us nothing that we need to beat Trump. 

But meh.

None of the top choices are perfect, and a lot of this can be mitigated with a strong VP pick. I’ll have no problem supporting a Harris candidacy, if indeed that’s what we get. Still, a contest of *some sort* is the best way forward - including and especially for Kamala Harris - even if it’s vanishingly unlikely to transpire. 

First, and most obviously, if Harris cannot emerge at the top of the pack, she probably shouldn’t be the nominee. There will be aggressive polling over the next few days all asking voters the same question: “Now that Biden’s out, who do you want?” If those polls consistently show somebody other than Harris, it would be wise not to anoint her without some semblance of competition. 

Republicans are going to call her a “DEI candidate” no matter what, and always were. But there’s a serious dimension to that charge. Harris had a very unusual ascendancy relative to the other top choices. She had barely arrived on the national stage when she ran a dead-in-the-water campaign for president, and was picked as VP despite this by a party that was quite open about the fact that her race and gender were determining factors in her selection. 

Democrats might have been okay with that in 2020, but the country has since badly soured on identity politicking of that sort. It would be foolish to expect voters to keep these reservations to themselves now that expressing them won’t get anyone canceled. If the party points to Harris and she underperforms, Dems will have to face some very uncomfortable questions about how and why it was decided that she was The One. Those questions will be a lot easier to answer if she can at least be justified as having been the product of some tournament. 

There are other reasons to favor an open convention. Remember: the people saying “bUt We aLrEaDy hAd tHe PrImArY” are just dead wrong. The whole point of this fiasco is that we didn’t have a primary. Not a real one. We had a rush by party elites to crown (please people, ‘coronate’ is not a word) Joe Biden, and whisk him past the voters in the hopes that they wouldn’t notice he was unfit. Well…whoopsiedoodle! 

At this point, I think Joe Biden might be the only party functionary at whom Dem voters are not furious. The folks who wanted Biden not to run (like me) are feeling burned by how avoidable this was, and are ragingly angry that we instead spent two years being gaslit by party hacks telling us he was fine, and not to trust our own lying eyes. Meanwhile, the people who really wanted Biden to hang in there are pissed at what they view (incorrectly, as I’ll explain) as an Ides of March situation; Et tu, Nancy? and all that. 

The point is, nobody - literally nobody - trusts these muppets to engineer some backroom deal that will carry us over the finish line. So they shouldn’t try! They should encourage other top tier Dems like Newsom, Buttigieg, et al to jump in the race, release convention delegates to vote for whomever they please, and let everyone (politely) duke it out in a floor fight. Emphasis on ‘politely’ there. There will be zero appetite for nastiness, and in this dream scenario of mine, the first candidate to “go negative” - God, remember when we actually concerned ourselves with that? - would be instantly and mercilessly blown out of the water, never to be heard from again. 

Yeah, this would all be weird and messy. It would also be entertaining as hell! And that’s maybe not the worst thing when we’re running against the greatest entertainer to enter politics since Ronald Reagan. If Kamala Harris can emerge from that scrum victorious, she’ll be a lot stronger for it. And if she can’t, whatever. She’s young enough to have several more shots at this. 

Annoyed as I am at party bigwigs for landing us in this mess, I’m willing to move past it. And hey, if they’re really just going to plop a crown on Harris, I’ll get on board with that too. I hope the people angry at Biden’s departure will also bury their rage and accept whatever process transpires. Some very thorough reporting from Politico lays out the events leading to Biden’s decision to step aside. I would encourage you to read the whole thing, but the tl;dr version is: nobody “stabbed him in the back.” What happened was, voters saw clips from the debate, voters freaked out, and voters started telling pollsters that they weren’t going to vote for Joe Biden. You’ll notice that nowhere in that formulation do party elites or the media twist the knife between Joe Biden’s shoulder blades. 

At the risk of stating the obvious, access to the president of the United States is pretty closely guarded. You’re not just going to pop over to 1600 Pennsylvania and get a sit-down with Joe. So naturally, the people actually talking to him, leaning on him, and wielding what influence they could over him were high level party players. But it’s not like they all lined up to go for his knees. Biden was reportedly being shown sugar-coated polling data that glossed over the fact that he was tanking everywhere he needed to win. That trend accelerated over the past week, his support even started to crater in places that had been safe before, like New Mexico and Virginia, and other Dems running for reelection started to panic. All that people like Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries did was…explain that to him. 

“Mr. President, I’m afraid you have no viable path to victory in November,” is hardly a betrayal. I can understand why Jill and Hunter Biden might see it that way, but there’s no reason on earth why any of the rest of us should. Remember, these people work for us, not the other way around. Serving a good term as president does not entitle one to a second. That’s just not how it works. If Joe Biden were the same man he was four years ago, there’d have been nothing to discuss here. But Father Time is a brutal, uncompromising bastard. 

Anyhoo, we’ll have more information very soon regarding how the party plans to proceed. Even if the intention is to pass the torch directly to Kamala Harris, there are still going to be some complicated mechanics associated with doing that. And as much as I suspect that that is precisely what will happen, I also suspect that high-level Dems are holding their fire, just for a few days, until they can get a glimpse of the first Bidenless polls, now that a Bidenless race is the reality. If Harris looks to be running strong, they’ll move ahead with the coronation. If she doesn’t, the others may decide to enter the fray. 

I’ll close with this: it wasn’t easy to do what Joe Biden just did. Anyone who has had to witness a loved one coming to terms with their decline will understand that. It is no small thing. Maybe we’ll win now, and maybe we won’t, but Joe Biden’s legacy as a public servant should glow brighter with this act of patriotic self-sacrifice. 

Thank you, Mr. President. You did the right thing. And it was a big fucking deal.