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Because they thought they could hide Bidens senility to the end of the election. They are just arrogant or it’s just too hard to coordinate of a problem, replacing an aging president, that Kamala just sort of fell into this position. She didn’t earn it, and if she wins it’ll be pure luck on her part: “the accidental president”
I’m actually somewhat looking forward to a Kamala presidency. She’s going to make DEI look horrific, by showcasing what it looks like to put someone so unprepared into the highest visibility role there is. She lacks the personality of a president, is utterly unpresidential, sort of like Trump but in a very different way as well. She can’t speak eloquently and has weird social mannerisms, and is apparently quite unlikeable as a leader. Trump, for all his narcissism (narcissism actually helps leadership in some ways) is at least charismatic and has a great sense of humor.
I don’t think this captures the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party. It isn’t a monolith.
It’s hard to go against an incumbent and the Bidens as a family, are very clannish (small-c, not ‘k’, please). When you say, “…they thought they could hide Biden’s senility…”, that is certainly true for the Bidens, as they shrank the inner circle around and access to Joe as criticism mounted.
Plus, a particular source of stubbornness from Biden was 2016. He was dealing with the loss of his son, true, but in order to get the Clinton machine behind him for his own election, Obama had already accepted it would be Hillary’s turn that year, after being his Secretary of State. And it bothered Biden when Obama informed him the support would be behind Hillary, it bothered Biden even more when Hillary lost to Trump as he felt he would have done better, and then Biden took 2020 as vindication of all his prior grievances about 2016. So, when people were trying to nudge him away from running again, in Biden’s mind, they were just more skeptics that he’d already proven wrong.
The next guard of Democratic presidential hopefuls — Whitmer, Shapiro, etc. — didn’t have the clout to push Biden aside on their own, and evidently none wanted to risk dimming their own star by losing an open primary going up against Biden and the money he had already raised from Democratic donors worried about a second Trump term.
The in for those outside Biden’s camp was the early debate and a bad performance, so power brokers from other camps within the party could claim through clenched teeth, of course they still supported Biden, but it was the public and donors had lost faith, and their hands were forced. This is when Pelosi, the Obamas and large donors struck.
As mentioned elsewhere on this topic, Harris was then effective in back room dealings and was able to scuttle a contested convention on the grounds that internal division might harm the chances of defeating Trump, and also, that if Biden withdrew, she was the candidate that would retain access to the money that had been raised for the Biden-Harris ticket.
I suspect if Whitmer and Shapiro could travel back in time, knowing what they now know, they would take their shot in an open primary. Now, there is at least a possibility Harris serves two terms, and who knows how hot their careers will be in eight years, plus Walz’s increased name recognition puts him in the mix.
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She apparently earned it in the sense that she was on the phones calling all the Party people she needed to call to prevent an open convention pretty much the moment Biden dropped out. She apparently has some kind of knack (hard to call it a 'talent') for internal party politicking that got her where she is today.
The problem there is that was also the talent Hillary Clinton had and she was much better at it.
That was my take as well: Hillary Clinton is a ghoulish power-seeker, but a competent one. If she won, she'd be a continuation of the Democratic technocrat rule.
If Kamala wins, America gets to experience its own 'time of troubles.'
Yep. The cold solace that it will be the cabinet and bureaucracy running the government so it doesn't matter if Kamala is an incompetent executive is not comforting at all after the last four years, where the cabinet and the bureaucracy were running the government and they were bad at it.
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You don't earn it by brownnosing or politicking, you earn it in the primaries by appealing to actual voters.
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Are you saying she is... a good politician?
The appropriate word is apparatchik.
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