The Biden Replacement Furor as an Insider Washington Play

Conspiracy stories come out of Hollywood, and insider plays come out of Washington, D.C., but sometimes there doesn’t seem to be much difference between them.

Four years ago in March, before Super Tuesday, Pete Buttigieg, seen as a plausible contender against then–former vice president Biden, dropped out of the Democrat presidential primary, and within a year was appointed secretary of transportation.  Reports indicated he’d spoken, before making his decision, with former president Obama.  A little over a month later, Bernie Sanders, the left-wing candidate whom Biden’s Buttigieg-enabled consolidation of establishment backing had left facing a monolith, withdrew, and within a year was chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.  A left-wing journalist in The Guardian at the time compared Biden to the Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev: an aging apparatchik guaranteed to push forward the prior Democrat president’s policies and not rock the boat.

Last Thursday, those leftists who saw this 2020 shift as a decisive Democrat turn away from authentic populism got some measure of satisfaction from a disastrous debate performance by the anointed apparatchik.  Briahna Joy Gray, the leftist writer and commenter who is also a scourge of Washington shibboleths, was direct, connecting the night’s disaster to Super Tuesday four years before: “YOU people brought this on yourselves. ... You applauded Obama calling on the other candidates to drop out so Biden could win.”  Matt Stoller, the antitrust crusader, accused the party of incompetence and wrote flatly: “No one’s in charge.”

This last statement may be true, or it may not be.  What the party may do next is stick with President Biden, who does not seem fully in charge of anything.  But Democrats also may revert to someone else being very much in charge: former president Obama, who in 2015 encouraged his vice president not to run for president as an exercise in political risk management, and who in 2020 lent him support for the same reason.  This year, as a third exercise in risk management, President Obama might again attempt to slide his successor out.  

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