I can’t help but notice that most of the calls for President Biden to be tossed out of the presidential race and replaced by a shiny new and younger but usually unnamed candidate have two weirdly connected features: 1) they also include jettisoning his Vice President Kamala Harris, his hand-picked successor: and 2) the cabal of commentators calling for this move is almost all white.
Hardly a coincidence. The white media elite has long treated America’s first Black vice president as invisible.
And, true to form, they have also thrown the invisibility cloak over tens of millions of Black voters who wholeheartedly support President Biden and Vice President Harris, pretending we don’t exist or just don’t matter.
It’s easy to float ideas when you’re not responsible for gaming them out, much less, making them work, and to assume that the outcome you want is the only outcome that will ensue. But that’s a child’s way of thinking, like a 5-year-old assumes the only possible consequence of dashing into traffic to retrieve her errant ball is that she will simply retrieve her errant ball.
The folks floating the cockamaimie Biden Replacement Theory that has no possible path to success (see my analysis here), seem not to have considered the political ramifications of banishing the sitting vice president into political exile.
The cavalier dismissal of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s replacement is particularly interesting given that she is one of fewer than a dozen people alive today who have actual hands-on experience as president or vice president. And three of those people are term limited, one is in hospice, and other than the previous vice president whom Biden’s opponent sent a mob to kill, the others have shown no interest in returning to the White House in any capacity.
So, if Joe Biden needs to be replaced, his hand-picked vice president is not only the most logical choice, she is literally THE most qualified person on earth available to step into his shoes should the need arise.
And yet, these pundits barely mention her in this regard and when they do utter her name, it’s simply to bat it away so the they can float the names of various white people who don’t come close to having her bona fides, name recognition, political support, or confidence of the president they want replaced.
The purported goal of the Biden Replacement Theory is to ensure a victory in November by switching him out with someone who supposedly will attract more votes than the incumbent president will. And yet the Kamala-free solution would hemorrhage tens of millions of votes of people – particularly African-American voters – who would not docilely go along with the first Black female vice president being supplanted by a largely unknown and untested candidate plucked from the Great White Hope short list, whom most people outside of their home state and a small circle of political junkies have never even heard of.
And yet, the pundits haven’t considered, much less managed to come up with a plan for making up for the innumerable critical votes that will be lost in this gambit and pulling together the fragile coalition of voters needed to win in November without Joe Biden on the ticket with Kamala Harris by his side.
Black voters, the loyal base of the party, who year after year put in the hard work and drag us over the finish line to victories made more difficult by reticent white Democrats, are only so tolerant and will only take so much before we say “Enough!” We are not going to accept being spit in the face as our votes and candidates are snatched away from us in order to appease a handful of unreliable Independents and shaky, fair-weather Democrats.
Many of the people who demand that Democrats upend our entire campaign to appease a few people they think might not vote for Biden because he’s not a spring chicken assume that Black voters don’t deserve the same (or any) deference because we’ll put up with anything – after all, “where else are they going to go,” right?
Well, invoke the ultimate act of white supremacy-steeped political betrayal against us and you’ll see where a critical mass of Black voters go. Or more accurately, where they DON’T go: to the polls.
And the few independents picked up with this scheme won’t come close to making up for the loss of Black support or the irreparable long-term damage done to the party and to the country as a result of such a monumental double-cross.
The chattering class of pundits and self-proclaimed but unidentified Democratic “insiders” have made it clear that Kamala Harris and millions of Black voters are irrelevant and invisible to them. But if the Democratic Party were to lose its collective mind and follow their advice, they will realize, too late, that they’ve made a tragic mistake.
Because while Black voters may be invisible to the media elite, the last thing the party or country needs is for Black voters to make ourselves invisible in November.