Why is it that, on the day Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the British cabinet, Leeds is waking up to images of riots and seemingly half the world's computers have been knocked offline, this newsletter is going to focus on the internal politics of the Democratic Party?
It is probably the same reason why you can name at least one US Supreme Court justice, but can't pick the prime minister of Portugal out of a lineup of Mark Littlewood impersonators. Partly, this is a result of the sheer wonder of America – its size and silliness. But it is also a recognition that what happens in the States impacts our lives in a way that almost nothing else can.
It is remarkable that just a few weeks ago, the US presidential election was considered to be a dull and fairly static affair between two old men we knew everything about. And then all of a sudden – in the space of a single television debate which revealed Joe Biden's cognitive decline – it all changed. Indeed, it is not inconceivable that Biden takes the weekend recovering from Covid-19 and decides to pull out of the 2024 race.
He doesn't have to, of course. The president has the delegates to secure his party's nomination. But the walls are closing in. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has warned Biden he cannot win, that he is dragging down Congressional Democrats and that the money may be drying up. His old boss, Barack Obama, has been conspicuous in his silence, though his former aides have been less coy.
If nothing else, it makes for a striking contrast with 2020, when the Democratic Party essentially decided that Biden should be the nominee, following the South Carolina primary. This time, however, the party is dragging its feet over the more arduous task of convincing Biden to step aside.
The obvious alternative is vice president Kamala Harris. But there's a problem – conventional wisdom suggests she is not exactly the world's most popular constitutional-break-glass-in-case-of-emergency fallback.
The curious thing about Harris is not how she became Biden's running mate, but why she performed so poorly in the 2020 primaries. Recall, she did not even make it to Iowa. Yet her background should have made Harris an ideal candidate in the Democratic contest. A mixed-race former prosecutor and California Attorney General with a tough-on-crime CV (her leftist critics denounced her as 'Kamala the cop'.)
Unfortunately for Harris, in addition to her reserved and somewhat stilted public persona, she was running in 2020. As The New York Times' Ezra Klein put it in his podcast recently:
"It’s post-Ferguson. It’s post-Black Lives Matter. George Floyd is yet to come, but we’re already in this moment where what you want to be is not a smart on crime Democrat."
Klein concludes:
"And so you have this person who had a very clear political identity, lost it in 2020, wins the vice presidency, but at the cost of losing that identity even more. And now everybody’s like, who is Kamala Harris?"
Forget Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer or [looks exhaustedly to camera] Michelle Obama – we may be about to find out.
