Biden Should Step Down, But Who Will Replace Him?

President Joe Biden’s apparent inability to remember which battles he fought in during the War of 1812 coupled with his difficulty recalling the names of even his closest relatives such as his wife, co-President Dr. Jill Biden, Ph.D., has caused many Democrats to worry that his candidacy is destined to go down in flames in the November elections.

With most national polls (including many swing state polls) showing Biden trailing former President Donald Trump, a number of prominent Democrats such as David Axelrod, former adviser to President Barak Obama, have gingerly proposed that Joe Biden consider stepping down for the good the country.

Axelrod himself stopped short of calling for Biden to drop out but instead said on X (formerly Twitter) that “Only Joe Biden can made this decision. If he continues to run, he will be the nominee of the Democratic Party. What he needs to decide is whether that is wise, whether it’s in HIS best interest or the country’s?”

The difficulty for the Democrats is that President Biden, like every president before him, is consumed with getting re-elected and securing his place in history. Although many of his detractors would argue that his gift for exploding both the national debt and the southern border at the same time ensures that he will be ranked somewhere in the bottom tier of chief executives,

Biden has said nothing to indicate that he might drop out of the race in favor of another contender. Indeed, there is another four years of truly transformational work to be done, whether it involves doubling the national debt or importing 40 million or 50 million additional future Democratic Party voters or even embroiling the nation in a few more military adventures abroad.

So if Joe Biden actually decided to leave the White House and return to his modest beach house at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, who would be the most formidable candidate to go forth and do battle with Donald Trump?

The vice president is usually the first person to be considered since he or she has spent four years in waiting, nodding politely in agreement with even the most inane statements of the chief executive. Unfortunately, Vice President Kamala Harris is the one person in the country who consistently polls even lower than Joe Biden in terms of favorability.

Indeed, most Democrats do not want her to run for president. In general, voters have never warmed up to Harris, who has been widely viewed as a “check the boxes” lightweight who was infamously put in charge of fixing the pretend southern border.

Unfortunately, her most memorable visit to the border was a trip to El Paso in June 2021 in which she declared that the growing flood of illegal migrants streaming across the border required solutions and not “finger-pointing” before proceeding to blame former President Donald Trump, who had left office six months earlier, for the disaster.

Setting aside her prowess as a border administrator, Harris has never run a sustained presidential campaign, unless you count the 10 minutes or so she was a candidate for president in 2019 until she was forced to shutter her campaign weeks before the Iowa caucuses due to lack of funds and, indeed, voters.

Others have also spoken longingly of the desire for a “mythical” candidate such as Oprah Winfrey or Michelle Obama. However, it is difficult to see why either of these women (or both of them) would want to sully their images and damage their brands by entering the grubby world of political campaigning.

Although both women are popular, they do not have political background and, arguably, lack the gravitas needed to be taken seriously by the voters. Of course Oprah could improve her chances of winning the presidency by promising to give every voter a new car.

But the reality is that both women enjoy luxury lifestyles and would immediately lose half of their following by jumping into the political ring — with no guarantee of winning the race. Indeed, Michelle Obama recently declared that she would not be a candidate for president, reaffirming that both she and former President Barack Obama are “all in” for Joe Biden.

The other person who is most frequently mentioned for the nomination is Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.

Newsom has spent much of the past year criss-crossing the country telling everyone that he is not interested in becoming president. Despite his numerous road trips, he is still (inexplicably) popular in the State of California even though he had helped to bury California in a $68 billion budget deficit; that's a gift that will come in handy if he should be called upon to oversee the generation of trillions of dollars of deficit spending on the national level.

Newsom has demonstrated great political dexterity by being able to embrace far-left causes such as reparations and free health insurance for illegal migrants before gingerly tip-toeing back to the middle of the political spectrum after the inevitable backlash arises from those voters who think that the State of California could be better run by a hamster.

However, Newsom is telegenic and well-spoken and could prove to be a formidable competitor to the likely GOP nominee, Donald Trump. After all, Newsom, for all his shortcomings, does have better hair than Trump.