The recent DNC coup seals the deal. Biden is out and Kamala Harris is in. Is that democracy in action? The Washington Post thinks so, as Matt Taibbi explains in his article, “In Final Kick in the Pants, Departing Biden Denounced as Another Trump: When Joe Biden failed to immediately assume the position when party bigwigs called for his head, Beltway insiders lumped him in with the Orange One”. An Excerept:
Florida canceled a primary for him; North Carolina, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Wisconsin submitted only his name to ballots; and New Hampshire chose delegates through a “nominating event” that didn’t include voters. Under a new vision in which “the DNC [was] not something separate” from the Biden campaign, the party refused to schedule debates with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dean Phillips, or Marianne Williamson. Proof that “America’s beleaguered system still functioned” would have involved a competitive primary through which Democratic voters could discover Biden’s infirmities early enough for them to have a say in choosing a fitter candidate. Instead, the public was only confronted with the truth a few weeks ago, by which time only internal party power brokers were positioned to make a change. That’s a failure of democracy, unless you think choosing a candidate without voter input is a systemic improvement.
The Post cheered the stage-managed primary season throughout, running laudatory pieces about “How the DNC challenger-proofed the primaries for Biden” and profiles of the “hidden campaign” Biden ran with the party. The paper noted the Biden team’s belief that the president could “seize the advantage of a unified party apparatus” while “splintered” Republicans faced “an increasingly bitter primary battle between Trump and his rivals for the presidential nomination.” In reality, Republicans benefited from competition, getting long looks at Trump and rivals like Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, while Biden was shielded from competition all the way through his calamitous collapse in the middle of a general election season.
