From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. So I'm recording this on Friday, July 5th. Because of now, we have not seen Joe Biden's ABC News interview, there is a lot happening, so I am low to give a state of play on where the Democratic nomination is at the moment, because by Tuesday, when this comes out, it might be somewhere very different.
But what I can say is as somebody who has been arguing for an alternative path to Biden since February, and particularly making the case for an open convention, it has been startling to see so many people come over to this position. And as always, when the conventional wisdom shifts very rapidly, you run the risk of the weak points in it, the flaws, the soft thinking, being overlooked.
The person I think making the best argument against some of these pathways has been my colleague, and New York Times Opinion, Jim El Buie, who has been making very historically and institutionally and coalitionally grounded arguments for what could go wrong at convention. So I wanted to have him on the show to talk through his thinking, how it's evolving, the weak points he sees in some of these emerging arguments that I've been making, and see where we end up.
As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Jim El Buie, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me. So let me offer a roadmap for this. I want to talk about whether Joe Biden is in shape to govern, which is one of the questions I think people have been batting around, whether he's in shape to run in 2024 and win, whether he can be replaced and what the downsides of that might be. But let's begin with the question of governing. Do you think Biden is fit to serve right now?
If I'm going to be completely honest, I don't know if I have access to the kind of information that would make me allow me to make a definitive judgment in that regard. The reporting suggests that he basically has a six-hour window in which he is at peak condition and then needs to rest. The reporting suggests that he's had forgetful moments and such. But I'm not even sure that that offers that much of a window into his capacity to govern.
If we're going to judge simply by the record of the administration thus far, I would say that he has the capacity to govern. The administration has juggled a lot over the last three years and changed. Major peace to legislation, foreign policy crises, so on and so forth. If you're going to look at simply what has the administration been doing, has it been dropping the ball on critical concerns about it in the country? I don't think it has been. Biden seems capable of governing.
Is he capable of the performance of governing? It has been for me one of the difficult cuts to make in evaluating him because there is the administration, which can clearly govern. But of course, that can in some ways obscure what is happening with the president at the center.
There are so many people making decisions, so many people working through the information that on the one hand, I think we know he's not making strange or erratic decisions in the way the Donald Trump himself often does and did. But it's also not clear how much credit to give him and his capacity, Biden and his capacity personally. On one of Biden deserves credit for all that because that's the normal rules of how we cover this.
On the other hand, it's a little hard to see through all that to the man himself. I think that's fair. I think I might make the observation that is often the case for presidents. Eisenhower famously had a matrix of presidential decision making.
I'm not going to remember I've talked about my head, but the rough outlines were things that were urgent and the president had to handle, meaning they'd urgent, very important things that were important, but not urgent, things that were neither urgent nor that important and things that were urgent, but not particularly important. And so much of the duty of being president and of choosing a staff, that can how manage all these things is figuring out which issues go where, who can handle what.
That's really only something a president can do. If we're looking at the administration's performance, and if we are saying to ourselves, this administration seems to be handling the important, urgent stuff quite well, it seems to be handling the important, but not urgent stuff quite well and so on and so forth, in the absence of any additional evidence, information. We kind of have to attribute at least that management of issues to Biden.
He's appointed a staff that's been able to handle information and handle situations as they come. And he seems to be able to at least make decisions about when he needs to step in and when he needs to intervene, which really is so much of the job of being president. How do you think about the question of deterioration? One of the things that has been coming on some reporting is people saying lapses that we have seen before have become more common.
Memory issues are sort of inability to follow the thread and we're not just hearing that from inside the administration. There was a Wall Street Journal piece that was sourced among European diplomats and leaders and they were saying that they had noticed a change in Biden. It had worried them the way he was performing and participating in things like the G7 meeting had seemed like it was different than it had been at the past.
Aging is often a sort of rapid and even exponential process at late ages. Are you personally, I've been trying to ask myself this, are you personally comfortable with the idea of Joe Biden as president for another four years? I don't know if I am. I'm not someone who thinks that Joe Biden is going to somehow drop dead in the middle of being president.
I joke about this, but by a sense of who Joe Biden is, is that if he's elected to another four years, or if he serves out in other four years, then he will die on January 21, 2029. You know, the day he's no longer president. He is powered by pure love of America and pure personal ambition. Maybe the two are conflated in his mind. But I don't, I don't, I don't know, I'm worried about that. Do I think he has the capacity to continue serving? I don't know. My inclination is to say probably not.
There'll probably be additional deterioration. He is 81. So over the course of four years, as you say, aging can happen quite rapidly. I'm sure you have seen this. I have seen this many of our listeners have seen this. And so the odds that next year, if he's an office or the following year, there's just rapid deterioration in his capacity. Even if it doesn't render him in firm and renders him unable to do the job, I think that's a real possibility.
There's another thing in this capacity cut that I've been weighing in my own mind, which is, I think if you dig in to what's implicitly being said about the job of the presidency versus the performance of the presidency, it's that the job of the presidency is to make these high stakes decisions. Will we stand with Bibbi Netanyahu? What will we do if Iran is launching an attack on Israel? Should the White House come out for this bill or that bill? What should it prioritize?
And then there's the performance side of it. But communication is part of the job too. And I mean, I think it's indisputable that Biden has deteriorated tremendously as a communicator even since 2020, that he's not persuasive. There's the power, the presidency is the power to persuade that Biden is not a guy you want right now negotiating with senators in the Oval Office.
I don't really think anybody believes he's going to be particularly effective at doing that or negotiating with foreign leaders. I was surprised in my own reporting over last week, how few Democratic senators have seen him recently. And there had been reporting that the number of in-person meetings with members of Congress had gone down in recent years, which might just be he's been focusing on foreign policy. But I was a little surprised to hear that.
Is this sort of cut people are making between performing the presidency, which is cut I made and doing the job of the presidency? Is that really a fair cut? So I would say that the distinction there is worth making.
And yet if you're going to make the argument that Biden has been an able president behind the doors, then I think it's also true that his inability to perform the presidency for the public, his inability to sort of go to the public directly and make his case has weakened his behind closed doors presidency, right? That the two things to operate together, they're part of the various levers and mechanisms of president can use to try to achieve there and their party's agenda.
And it is likely harmed by it and that he cannot simply go to the American public, right? And make a forthright and persuasive case about inflation to help create a story for Americans to understand why we've had this inflation and what is the administration is doing. So going back some years, the time, Siena Pol has had this question, do you think Joe Biden is too old to be an effective president?
In 2020, it was around 35% of people did really all year in 2024 and I don't think it was that different in 2023. Most people, supermajorities, 69%, 70% have said he is too old to be an effective president. It's actually sounding to me like you also think that if I'm reading you, right? But tell me if I'm not. So if that's true, isn't that reason enough to not run him?
I think that is an interesting way of posing the question because the idea that there is someone who cannot choose to run Joe Biden for president, I think is not the case, right? We don't live in a party system where political parties have that kind of control of authority or authority over the people that they nominate for the office of the presidency.
The only person who can determine whether or not Joe Biden ran again this year was Joe Biden and his decision more or less sort of shaped the rest of how the party, the Democratic Party responded. And if Joe Biden doesn't think he's too infirm, then that sort of settles the question as far as the Democratic Party is concerned.
If I back up a bit here, I think part of my intervention into this conversation has been to just insist on thinking this through within the political system that we have and not the one that we want or the one that we imagine we have. Maybe I think he's too old, most Americans think he's too old, but those aren't really the relevant actors in terms of the decision of whether a president is going to stand for reelection.
So it's actually something I really appreciate about your commentary on this. I mean, I think it's fair to say sort of an institutionalist, right? I think you take seriously institutions of American politics, and I think of myself as that kind of commentator as well. And so it's been interesting to me where we diverge, but one place is on this question of the power of the party.
We don't live in the strong party system of Martin Van Buren, but we do live in a system where parties are there and matter. And I've personally been surprised by both the fatals and people felt about this, but also the rapid emergence of party pressure after the debate. So it's true that only Joe Biden really at this point can decide whether he runs again or does not, but do you really think he's not affected by the signals coming from the rest of the party, right?
So I think it was meaningful when members of the House like Dogget and Groholva began coming out and saying he should not run again, right? That seemed to me to be an important crack you're seeing a lot of leaks from his team. In a way we haven't seen before, there's a lot more internal administration leaking. Like I think you should understand that in a way as a party action.
The donors who are moving Biden has, according to Times reporting, been telling some allies that he recognizes he only has a number of days, a number of weeks in which to save his candidacy. I think in a way, if I have a very low opinion of Joe Biden, to say that if key purple state governors and senators and House members are saying he shouldn't do this and the donors are fleeing, that that's not going to enter his calculations.
It's just going to kind of bowl forward on this no matter how unlikely a victory looks for him or no matter what his poll numbers look like. All that pressure is informal. We'll say, right? It's signals sent to both allies, to the public, to everyone's who had been involved. In the way that the Republican Party of 1872, they could have actually taken specific and concrete measures to remove Ulysses S. Grant from the ticket and nominate someone else.
That kind of power doesn't exist anymore within a political party. For as much as there is this real pressure coming from various actors within the Democratic Party and those aligned with the Democratic Party, to my mind, that's almost as much vindication of the observation of the parties. They're just too weak to be able to exert that kind of influence on the president. Do I think that Joe Biden, if the call for him to leave the race, were to go right now it's sort of like it's like a growl.
If it were to become a roar, do I think that he is going to ignore that? I don't think so. I think he is too tight in to the Democratic Party as his identity at this point. He is too committed to his relationship to this institution to completely disregard that. My main point is that it's still his decision. That's why so much of this reporting, what is his family saying? What is his closest associate saying? They have as much weight as a purple state governor does for good or ill.
From my perspective, this is bad. From my perspective, it would be a good thing. If American political parties were such that after the debate, Democratic Party elites, the bosses could get together and say, okay, we're not going to run this guy. He had no choice in the matter. But that's not the world we live in. Do you think a Biden ticket or a Harris ticket is a stronger ticket for Democrats in November? Man, as we're putting a run on the spot.
Man, you can't make all these good arguments and then, you know, okay. And I'll answer it too. You can push us back at me. I'm happy to put myself on the chopping block too. To the extent that Biden's presence on the ticket is undermining party unity in a real and serious way, I think a Harris-led ticket is stronger.
That's sort of making the assumption that Harris is able to bring the entire Democratic Party, elected officials, donors, affiliated groups, affiliated individuals in the press, all that stuff right behind her unified than I think that is a stronger ticket. I think that if Harris is at the top, she will have a vice presidential nominee.
And the choice of nominee also provides opportunities to send a message, to make a kind of electoral case that I think could be advantageous to the Democratic Party and can sell this image of, this is not a radical ticket, this is not a ticket that's reaching out to transform America. This is a ticket of two moderate politicians who want to stop Donald Trump and want to bring along as many Americans as possible. So assuming unity, I think a Harris ticket is probably stronger.
And what polling we have at the very least suggests that it's no worse. I could give you my case for an open convention and have you poke holes in it or do you want to tell me your case against it and we can go the other way. What sounds more enjoyable to you? How about I just give my case against it? Go for it.
I don't think the argument that has been put out there by some observers that you could remove Biden with no particular incident in terms of his political hit to the Democratic Party and then have an ad hoc process up the convention. I think that's the downside risks of that are actually very high. The odds that you get a chaotic, contested convention, a convention process that for one isn't really designed for what I think people imagine happening here.
The odds that you get that that maybe even is inconclusive is I think a way worse outcome than just having Biden at the top of the ticket. The delegates to conventions. I think it's going on a very micro level. These are not party bosses. This is not 1944 when you have like the bosses St. Louis on the floor, hassling people to get true and on the ticket.
This is not a party convention, even in 1960 or 1964 where you have party bosses and people who represent constituencies and interests and votes on the floor, hassling people, making deals, trading that kind of thing. That doesn't exist anymore. It's some elected officials, but it's a lot of ordinary people who are dedicated volunteers and their local party is their state party and they go on behalf of a candidate.
I think this is important to emphasize because no offense to any of these people, they're all great. I've been to conventions. I've talked to people who go. They're wonderful people who are really engaged and sort of like the day-to-day of American democracy and I have a lot of respect for them. I don't think there are people equipped to do the high stakes negotiating that comes with choosing a presidential nominee.
I think that putting that kind of weight on the process as it actually exists is not going to lend itself well to a kind of orderly or even sort of like temporarily chaotic decision-making that I think people want. I think what's more likely to happen is confusion and disarray in a way that does harm the democratic ticket. The alternative to that, which is Biden steps down from his campaign and his vice president takes the reins as the nominee of Democratic Party. I still think it has some risk.
It's sort of unclear how Kamala Harris will be perceived by the general public. But I think it has the advantage of, because she's elected vice president, because she is a constitutional successor if you were to leave the presidency. All that kind of puts pressure in favor of everyone who's going to get behind this and be unified.
If I had to summarize my view of the risk here, the more the Democratic Party is perceived to be ununified and in disarray, to use the cliche, the more dangerous that is for the party's November chances.
One thing I do think, well, two things I think are not taken seriously enough, is simply just what the Republican message is going to be here if there is any kind of disarray, even if you get the best possible scenario here, if Biden steps down and you get Harris or whoever, and everyone's united behind them, the Democratic Party is ready to go. I think the message from the Republicans that first Trump is so dominant that he forced the president out of the race.
Second, that can you trust these people to run the country? I think those are two potent messages and it would take a lot of work to push back on them with success. I think where I am at this moment, post-debat, is actually quite agnostic about whether Biden should step down or not. But if that's the choice people are going to make, I'm urging everyone to take the practical stuff very seriously. You do not think of this as, oh, he'll be gone and everything will be magically better.
Maybe you raise your odds from where they are, but there'll be a whole new set of challenges to tackle. And once you take that step and be prepared to tackle them and not be top flat-footed by them. The critique I would make of the Democratic Party with Biden over the past couple of years has been that they've been playing it safe in a way that I think was predictable, but proved to be playing it very unsafe. And the way they were doing this is by denying themselves information.
There's no competitive primary. The thinking there made some sense, right? A competitive primary will weaken an incumbent president that's typically something that happens to incumbents who are going to lose. So I understand why you don't want that. At the same time, he wasn't doing tough interviews. He wasn't giving press conferences. He was skipping the Super Bowl interview. We have no information about how this guy would perform in public under pressure in uncontrollable situations.
And again, just at his age for anybody, that would be a thing worth finding out. And then they put this student debate on the board thinking that he's going to perform really well, and it's going to really help them in the campaign. And it actually turns out he cannot perform under the lights. And the argument I would make for some kind of open convention over some kind of coronation is that the Democratic Party just needs information it doesn't have. I think Harris is underrated.
But I don't know if you want to be reductive and put candidate quality on a one to ten scale. If you say she's currently viewed as a five, which I'm not saying is true, just for the sake of argument. She could be underrated and be a six or underrated and be a nine. And those are very, very, very different conditions.
Like you want to know to the extent you can how all these people seem when they really have to perform under high levels of pressure and really have to introduce themselves in an intensive way to the American people. And I think that a market party has become a very orderly party. Unlike the Republicans who keep knocking out their speakers and primaring themselves, the Democrats don't like chaos, but sometimes it seems to me you need disorder to surface information.
And if Democrats want to win in November and also want to pick somebody they're excited about, they need as much information as they can get. I think that's a really powerful case for a convention of some sort to determine the nominee. And this idea that the Democratic Party has been quite orderly is compelling.
When I think about this content with the Democratic Party, especially among younger voters, I do think this is a sense it's sort of it's completely calcified and that there's not really much one can do to create different outcomes within it. And so if a convention process would help push back on that, I think that might be beneficial to the Democratic Party.
See, I'll be frank with you, Ezra, there is a mode of like thinking and writing about politics that like looks at it like purely in terms of like entertainment. And I just find that so distasteful. And so I've seen arguments for, this is not an argument you've made at all, but I've seen arguments for conventions. It's sort of like they're like, oh, it'd be entertaining. It'd be an exciting thing to see. And I'm just sort of like, this is choosing the nominee to be president of the United States.
Like what? But at the same time, I have made the argument that part of what is harming the Democratic Party and its political strategy is that it does not do enough. And I think this echoes you here to create the conditions for getting earned media, to put it like very mechanically, but like to create splashes, to do things that draw attention and that refocus attention on it and its priority and so on and so forth.
And so knowing that I've made that argument, it does stand kind of intention with my like distaste for the idea of a convention. And I think I have to concede here that like, yeah, if you could have some combination of like orderly with like, you know, enough for form disorder, that could be a political class that for a democratic party that needs to sort of not just energize its own voters, but show the broader public that there's energy there.
In addition to one thing this might be value before is allowing Democrats to put forth what their vision for the country ought to be. What the rich could for the country is, which I've been struck by how little of that we've gotten in this campaign this far. Like what exactly does a democratic party want the United States to look like for years hence? I think you're right actually that it is a bit distasteful.
I have in me a sort of respect for the systems where the way the leader of the party is chosen is by the people who know the leader of that party really well, right? The sort of more proud of my tree systems. But given the one we're in, this question of what is your theory of attention? I think ends up being really important.
And one of the things that I think they've been struggling with the Democrats this year is that their theory of attention in 2020 and 2024 was the same, which was let Donald Trump control the attention and let Donald Trump be the media strategy. And in 2020 the idea was if everybody's thinking about Donald Trump, well, they don't like Donald Trump. So if they're thinking about Donald Trump, they're going to go over Joe Biden, which at a critical level proved true.
And in 2024 that was their theory of it again. Biden's campaign over and over made the case that presidential approval ratings and presidential vote were going to decouple here because you don't really need to like Joe Biden to vote against Donald Trump. But the problem they faced is that as Donald Trump has again sort of absorbed the attention and not in ways you would necessarily think are positive for him, right? In the news every day for criminal cases, it hasn't seemed to hurt him.
He's pulling better than he ever has before. And Biden has not been effective at retaking attention for his initiatives or for his policies or for his vision. Then the debate happens, which is supposed to be this moment of people coming face to face with Donald Trump in the steeper way. And they come out feeling better about Donald Trump and worse about Joe Biden.
So on the one hand, I think I emotionally and more were where you are on this, like I don't prefer this is the way of picking presidents. And on the other hand, I think one thing Democrats need to understand as a problem for them right now is they had a theory of attention, which is let Donald Trump take it and repel the electorate and that theory is failing. And they need some other theory, but I don't understand.
I actually myself do not understand what the alternative theory of attention under Joe Biden would be. Whereas I think sort of an argument for all the other candidates, Harris on down, is it we don't know how it would play out, but all of them would change the attention of dynamics of the election. Like if Biden stepped aside tomorrow, Donald Trump would spend the next two months trying desperately to break into a new cycle. I think that's right.
Simply standing back and letting Trump drown is not a viable strategy. This is the thing that Democrats have been struggling with the past couple years as well, that just they get no credit for anything.
There's a perception that the Biden administration has not done anything in office and I think that owes itself a lot to the fact that the administration, although it's not like they're not holding events and they're growing on such things, but they don't really break through into the public consciousness in a way that would at least remind people, tell people that that things are happening. I think when the IRS announced that it collected $300 billion from tax cheats, they had gone on paid.
I'll be fair. Then I think Biden should have had a press conference represented the American people with $300 billion check. I think that would have been silly, but it would have created some attention and would have grabbed the imagination a little bit. Yeah, they don't real showman instincts over there right now. I think for part of the reason you described a sense of distaste for it.
I've heard reporting that there were discussions around the stimulus, the COVID stimulus, when Biden was in office, that they should try to do more of what Donald Trump did and send these checks that really emphasized that Biden was president and Joe Biden himself was personally sending you a check. Biden himself did not like that idea that he felt that was a bit unseemly. And ethically, I am with him on that. And politically, I am not with him on that.
Because we're at the risk of now, I think, too much agreement. Let me have a pick in to ways that the open convention could go wrong. And one that you've spoken about, one that others have spoken about, is what if it ends up feeling illegitimate? Either who chose is illegitimate or who they chose is illegitimate. They didn't end up choosing Kamala Harris. People are pissed maybe, maybe it's young voters, maybe it's black voters. Talk me through some of the things that actually could go wrong.
The Democratic Party, if it goes in this direction, is going to need to think very carefully about how to manage. Yeah, I think that to me is the big, as I said before, that is the big risk that the outcome out of there is perceived as illegitimate. And perceived as illegitimate because it basically sidelines Kamala Harris. I don't think one should take lightly the fact that she was on the ticket.
She was the voters designated choice, 81 million voters designated choice for who should take over in the event that Biden was no longer able to. And that is real democratic legitimacy. It may not be the same time that you get through a party primary, but it is real legitimacy that no other candidate would have. And so I do think that a process that produced someone other than Harris runs the risk of messing angering all black voters for nothing like that.
But it is undoubtedly true that Harris is on the ticket in part because she just represents sort of like Biden's close alliance with many black voters in the Democratic Party who delivered him a nomination in 2020 and kind of sidelineing her, muscling her out, everyone to put it could be quite alienating. And people, I think people would be asking like legitimate questions about why, like why essentially why are you having this process from the vice president is right there?
And you'd really be relying on discontented Democrats to just fall in line. And I don't think you want that. I don't think you want discontented Democrats to just fall in line. I think you want everyone to be enthusiastic about the choice. What is your explanation and assessment of why the Washington political view of Harris fell so much between 2020 when she gets named to the ticket and doesn't perform badly in the election or anything, right? It doesn't have huge mistakes or gaps or problems.
And you know, called January of 2024, what happened in the sentiment around Harris? And do you think it was fair? I find this very interesting. You might even say strange because you're right during the 2020 campaign, Harris does not perform poorly. She performs pretty well. She performs basically sort of like what you would expect a capable, confident, vice presidential nominee to perform. She's not, doesn't take away from the ticket.
Does not harm the ticket and is unable, you know, surrogate for Joe Biden. It's true that her primary campaign came to a premature end. But I don't see that. I've encountered many people who see that as sort of like this positive for political skills that she didn't make it into voting. Therefore, she's bad at politics. But if that's going to be our measure of whether or not someone is good at politics, so like how did Joe Biden become president, right?
Yeah, exactly. How is Joe Biden's 2008 campaign? Right. How was his 1988 campaign? It was so weird, like this unbelievable memory hauling of Joe Biden's 2008 campaign, which got nowhere in the primaries. You can't ask for a new one. You still know what's president in a good 2020 candidate. And if you want to go down the list, right, of like the people who have been president over the last 40 years, you know, Reagan did have a pretty strong 76 campaign, but he ended up losing.
HW Bush lost his 1980 primary and was by no means like an inspiring figure, right? This measure of political skills is being solely tied to your performance in a presidential primary. I just don't think holds up. Now since she became vice president, there are these early stories about her office about, you know, disorganization or conflict. Those have subsided.
And it really, by all appearances, seems that the office has run very smoothly, very tightly that she's been an able ally to Biden over the last year and a half or so since really the Supreme Court's ruling in DOBS, she's been on the stump, speaking on abortion rights and has been very good at this. So I don't, I mean, if you're looking at just like the evidence, it's like I don't, there's no evidence that Kamala Harris is some uniquely bad politician.
The other data point, people will point to is her 2010 race for California, 20 general, but like she read it like the worst year for Democrats of the 21st century is so far against the LA district attorney. So it's sort of like, I don't know, did you underperform the state ticket? Yeah. Does that tell us much? When the following cycle, she performed just as well as the rest of the ticket. Then I don't know if it does.
Okay. So having said all of that, my sense of why people are nervous about Kamala Harris is a couple of things.
The first is that during her 20, 20 campaign or at least during 2019, she seemed to display some of the instinct that is her Democrats in the past, which is like being a little too afraid, I'm just forthrightly putting out like what her vision of the country is and sort of putting out this like kind of piecemeal, neoliberally policy proposals, which just like don't fire anyone up and seem to display bad instincts.
I think she's pretty good on the stump, but how I put this, she's like, she's a little corny. As a politician goes, I don't think this is a bad thing. I like cornyness. I feel like politicians who win are corny, typically. Everybody loves cringe. That's why it's cringe. As we're this is exactly right, but I think that that rubs off at least on some people the wrong way. Then this is not last or at least the fact that she's a black woman, right? And it's right.
I feel like this is like the unspoken thing in all of this and that no one wants to just say outright. We think that a black woman would not be able to win a national election. But I would prefer that if folks do think that that you should just say it until we can kind of debate that and like think that we're openly, but I do think that's behind some of the nervousness.
My own view is that in an election cycle where there's a lot of discontent and people are looking for something new, I don't think that that's a debilit for a Harris ticket. Not saying that this is going to necessarily drive tons of people to the Democratic ticket, but it is a true novelty that might be more asset than liability. But I do think that race and gender are working here, right?
The last Democrat to lose the Donald Trump was a woman, Hillary Clinton, and there is fear of repeating that with another woman and with a black woman in particular. I agree with you that that is a huge part of what people are actually debating here without often saying it aloud.
And in the way outframing, I'd be curious if this framing resonates for you, is it Harris was both helped and then wounded by a fairly rapid change in the Democratic Party's theory of politics that happened between 2020 and 2024. When she's picked for the ticket, it's the post-George Floyd moment. There's a sense that the Democratic Party is this rising multi-ethnic demographic play the demographic lines. You can just look at them on a chart and the multi-ethnic coalition was rising.
And then there's this sort of whole backlash to wokeism and back, or what gets called wokeism and backlash to this sort of moment in politics. And Harris, who I think was in part for the Biden campaign, a way of having someone on the ticket who could represent that moment and also be sort of a bridge that Biden would build to the next part of the Democratic Party and she could take the baton to fix metaphor, that's no longer really believed. Like Harris's pick is part of a theory of politics.
It did not quite work out. And now, like explicitly or implicitly, the view in the Democratic Party is you run moderate white people from Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, that kind of thing, or really extraordinarily talented politicians like Anobama or people sometimes talk about a war knock. But that the thing that propelled her in the first place has ceased to be the dominant theory of politics in the party.
I think that's really a student analysis of what has happened with Harris and I think I agree with it. I think that especially Trump's performance with Black and Latino voters after 2020 really spooked Democrats quite a bit and there's been this ongoing conversation about like what to do about that, how to address that.
So if you're going to make a case for Harris, given that sort of what the theory of winning appears to be, I think that first of all, you have to recognize it's sort of like running moderate whites has not been a perfect solution for winning in the Biden years thus far. Not ever candidate who fits that bill has one can see do not fit that bill have one we just mentioned more knock, but he's a great talent as well.
But it's still quite extraordinary that he's one of the senators from Georgia right now. So this is for listeners who may be more on the left. This is I feel like the neck I like they're going to hear this. But what of the criticisms of Harris from the left has always been about the fact that she has this criminal justice background. She was prosecutor during general quite carceral in her thinking all those sorts of things. And to my mind, that has always been kind of her great political asset.
Her having been you know the chief law enforcement officer of California is a political asset when it comes to reaching out to moderate voters. And it's not hard at all to think of a message for the Harris campaign in the wake of dobs that is all about speaking forthrightly about the consequences of dobs for violence against women. Like all that stuff is like those are those are real political assets for Harris.
I'm not sure how you counteract the feeling that moderate white candidates are sort of your best bet. I'd only observe that politics is just not that mechanistic. You know, you know this that things can be very unpredictable. I agree with this. People have their intuitions and they should not disregard their intuitions. But things can work out in practice that you wouldn't have imagined actually working out in your theories. I think it's some of the story of Joe Biden again.
Biden haven't been in politics for so long and being such an old hand.
I think of yours how genuinely strange it is that he became president that a guy who although you know well loved by Democrats well liked well respected at the twilight of his career doing something that's genuinely difficult in American politics which is defeating an incumbent president unlikely and I think it's important to take seriously that like unlikely things things that seem unlikely happen quite frequently in politics.
And so maybe it's the case that Kamala Harris is her gender in her race are these insurmountable obstacles for her. But who knows this is not something I think we can actually predict. And I think that as a politician Harris has enough assets and if the Democratic Party does unite behind her that there's no reason she couldn't win. So Jim Clyburn the congressman from South Carolina co-chair of Joe Biden's 2024 campaign.
He's been very clear that he supports Biden that if Biden drops out he supports Harris. But he was asked about this on CNN and I want to play his comments to you because I thought they were actually pretty important. And so you can act a fashion the process is already in place to make it a mini primary and I would support that absolutely. We can't close that down and we still open up everything for the general elected.
And I think the Kamala Harris will quit herself very well in that kind of a process but then there will be fair to everybody. So all of the other governors who may be interested in this some that I would be interested in from as well because if she were to be the nominee we need to have her running mate and get a strong running mate. And so all of us who give us a good opportunity not just to measure up who would be good to be at the top of the ticket but also who would be best in second place.
So what I understand him is saying there and he talks at different points on this interview about other pieces of it. Is that the DNC could create what he calls a mini primary. There could be town halls, there could be interviews on CNN and MSNBC or who knows Fox News, the network news shows they could do all kinds of things debates right. I mean the DNC runs debates knows how to do that.
But his argument is that you could build something that would give people information beforehand then we could see who's doing how well in the polls. We could see who's getting which kinds of endorsements. Then obviously to actually hit the real convention and there would be these big speeches. And that if you did that on the one hand if Harris is going to win it would make that win feel fair and legitimate. You would have beaten these other contenders.
She'd have a good idea of who would be good in number two slot for her. And presumably even if she doesn't then at least there's been a real process. What do you think of that? You know what? That sounds okay to me. Let it not be said that I won't change my mind. That sounds totally reasonable to be. What are we going to do for the rest of this podcast, man?
If the desire here is to be fair and give everyone a fair shake and not create the sense that it's just a done decision by a handful of party elites which as I suggested before I have no particular problem with then I think that makes a lot of sense. Especially if one of the arguments I have made is that because the Democratic coalition there are fractures in it.
And so a process that risks creating disunity that will not be settled during the course of the campaign or likely not be settled during the course of the campaign I think is one where people should tread lightly. Even if I think Clyburn's idea has like real merit to it that is always the application and I'm not sure how you navigate it. I'm not sure how Democrats, if this were to happen, right? If you were to have this open process and let's say Harris performs great.
Let's say it turns out she's like an eight in terms of like political skill, like just a totally and yet nervous Democrats go for a white candidate who just isn't as skilled on this stump. Maybe see might they might be but turns out not not quite as good as you would have liked. If that happens that's real problem and I'm not sure how you resolve that.
It's a problem especially given the larger context and which is happening which is right this Supreme Court going after affirmative action the attacks on DEI it would feel like the Democratic party basically recapitulating things happening nationwide and political life. I think this question of Irresolvable discontent is a really profound one for this election because when I think about the different pathways here I see a real risk of it in all of them.
If Joe Biden keeps running despite all of these calls for him to step aside despite 75% of voters saying he's too old for the job. If the party closes ranks around him which as much discontent as there is right now in private relatively few elected Democrats have come out for him to step aside and he loses I think the fury is going to be actually quite overwhelming. I think people aren't prepared for what a breach that will be between the party in its base.
I mean the anger I get right now in my own email of Democrats who feel they're being gassed by their party. You being told this was you know 90 minutes versus three and a half years or whole career like they're furious about it. So if the party runs by and I think this is issue of discontent because you know how can you do this right like everybody can see this is going to go badly.
If the party coalesces around Harris really rapidly I can imagine discontent from people feel look like we never got a chance to vote on her. I don't think she's a strong candidate right. She's not able to answer these questions people had about her and then if she loses I think that will really explode too.
And then as you say there's the open convention version of discontent which is that the open convention doesn't feel legitimate to people managing the possibility for maybe not schism but anger and a feeling that we were not listened to in every one of the past Democrats have now seems really quite tricky to me. I think you're right to sense the real danger within the Democratic Party of like a fundamental crack up.
And part of what has been interesting about Biden, the choice of Biden and the Biden presidency is that it has that was a paper over divisions within the Democratic Party but sort of the desire to get Trump out and to keep Trump away has through Biden really kept rival factions wings of the party kind of at bay. But this situation has the real possibility of tearing the whole thing apart.
I think you're right that if Biden stays in and loses that's going to be like a kind of injury to the Democratic Party from which I'm not sure it could actually recover. That feels like the kind of thing that just tears a political party apart by trade forwardly. Maybe it didn't happen if there's 68 of the Democratic Party that emerges out of 68 is and after out of Nixon's victory is much changed and has like significant divisions but this feels on that order at the very least.
And then if he does drop out whoever is chosen and they lose that's a whole other set of recrimination. It's just a bad situation. I don't know. This is where I'm finding myself as like a political observer. It's an unprecedented terrible situation. In some other world, Joe Biden is 15 years younger, you know, and this isn't an issue. But in this role, he isn't. There are a bunch of suboptimal choices that we've been discussing.
I'm skeptical of the open convention thing, but there's downsides to just going as you mentioned, just going should have with hair, even though there may be the least there. There's real downsides and issues there separate apart from however her performance might be in a general election. And they're obvious downsides with sticking with Biden. And I think what makes this so hard and so contentious is that there's no clear answer. You really just make an elite buffet here.
You just sort of have to make a decision and then you know, stick with that decision. I'm trying to think if that line slim Charles has in the wire about going to war on a lie. This wouldn't be going more on a lie. But once you've committed, then you're committed. You have to stay through. You have to carry it through. And I think that's the situation that Democrats are in. You're a history guy.
Do you find there to be something eerie this year about the Democratic Convention being in Chicago, the possible first serious, even open convention since the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago that was such a catastrophe in a year when the sitting president decided not to run again, that it led to the end of open conventions in the modern era. Like is that there's something strange about the location that this might all play out? Yeah, no, it's eerie. It's weird.
It's very strange that we are, you know, we're not recapitulating 1968. Like it's a very different world, a very different set of situations, a very different political party.
And yet there are these echoes, there are these vibrations, you might say, that are weighing on situation, unpopular war abroad, a divisive president incumbent president who may you very well be declining the stand for reelection, a contentious, perhaps convention, a vice president that people are very suspicious about and uncertain of all of these elements are there. And it's very strange. And I have no like great grand historical insight here, other than to say, it's really weird.
It's really strange. And the comfort we should all take is the history does not actually repeat itself. The past is the past. And whatever happens at this Chicago in 2024 is going to be shaped by the particular dynamics and forces at work in this political environment in this world. I think that's a good place to end. All of our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
Since I just sort of alluded to Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's Vice President in 1968, I'm going to recommend first a great book into the bright sunshine young Hubert Humphrey in the fight for civil rights by Samuel G. Friedman. And it is basically a biography of Hubert Humphrey up until the 1948 Democratic convention when he maneuvers with the American to a democratic action to put a civil rights plank, a strong civil rights plank into the Democratic Party platform in the 48 convention.
This is one of sort of the real pivotal moments of American political history. It does.
And the book kind of details, it kind of changes happening in especially American cities, within democratic politics, through the New Deal into World War II that kind of produce both a style of liberalism that Humphrey exemplifies in activist movement, I'm exemplified at the time by a Philip Randolph and other figures, and how this comes together to produce this major change that fractures the Democratic Party at the time but ends up transforming American politics. Great book.
You come away with real appreciation for Humphrey? I did. So there's that. A second book is Wide Awake, the forgotten force that elected Lincoln and spurred the civil war. This is about the Wide Awakes, a kind of quasi military force of young men who are ardent Lincoln partisans in the 1860 election and the book very much about the Republican Party of that era. And it's sort of partisan, the Republican Party has like a partisan organization as a party.
It's by John Greenspan and it's a lot of fun to read. And if you like me, are just a fan of 19th century American politics, you will enjoy this book.
And then for a third book, this is a little, I'd say like left field of these two books, which are these two previous books, which are very much about party politics, but I read Stephen Hahn, a historian, his new book, A Liberal America, which stretches back to America's the country's colonial origins to the present, to think the rule, sort of like the liberal political tradition in American life. It's wide ranging and very interesting and worth reading. Jim Elbowey, thank you very much.
Thank you. This episode of The Asher Clancho is produced by Lys Isquif, fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary March Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Gell with additional mixing by Amman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu and Chris D'Lin. We believe original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Simuluski and Shannon Busta.
The executive producer of New York Times' opinion audio is Annie Rose Strosser and special thanks to Sonia Herrera.