When Will Biden Put Aside His Ego And Withdraw For The Sake Of The Country?

One of the Manchester, New Hampshire state legislative districts has 3 seats in the state House. All the candidates, regardless of party, run on one ballot. It's a blue area and the three top vote-getters were all Democrats. In 2018, Democrats Chris Herbert and Ben Baroody came in first and second with over 5,000 votes each. Richard Komi, after polling last in the Democratic primary, came in third with 4,517 votes, beating out top GOP vote-getter Ross Terrio's 3,868 votes. The conservative Komi, a Nigerian refugee, had supported Biden all through the primaries. Bernie came in first in New Hampshire with 76,324 votes. Biden came in a distant 5th with just 24,921 votes, too few votes to qualify for any delegates. And in Hillsborough County, which Komi represents, Bernie also came in first with 25.7% with Biden again, a distant 4th and just 8.8%. Komi didn't mind that his constituents are more progressive than he is. And they probably don't care anymore either since he resigned Friday. Why? Look at this tweet for his boy Status Quo Joe, now deleted:

House Speaker Steve Shurtleff was mortified and told Komi to resign: "I am appalled by Representative Komi’s comments. They were dismissive and hurtful to survivors of sexual assault across the Granite State and across the country. The comments are not fitting for the New Hampshire House of Representatives and immediately upon learning of them I called him and asked Representative Komi to resign his seat."

The Tara Reade scandal has been building slowly. Biden and his handlers had hoped it would go away if they just ignored it-- and, indeed, pre-primary no one from the corporate media would touch it. Now the corporate media is all over it and Biden has finally been forced to respond. His allies are smearing Reade viciously and are basically one tiny baby step away from asserting she paid men to let her blow them. One of them has already said Putin paid her to accuse poor ole Joe, who everyone knows never puts his hands in any women, just all over them. Non-corporate media has been covering this already, of course.

Saturday, Caroline Kitchener asked and tried to answer a question for Washington Post readers-- could Biden really step aside because he has been exposed? "No presidential candidate," wrote Kitchener, "wants to be on the wrong end of an 'October surprise': Major news breaks at the last minute-- maybe the media unearths an old videotape, or the FBI resuscitates a closed investigation into a particular collection of emails. The campaign has to do damage control with limited time before Election Day. October is still a long way away. It was March 25 when Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer, publicly accused former vice president Joe Biden-- the presumptive Democratic nominee for president-- of digitally penetrating her with his fingers while she worked in his office in 1993. On Monday, Reade’s former neighbor corroborated Reade’s account in an interview with Business Insider, saying Reade told her about the assault in the mid-90s, soon after Reade says it occurred. Biden spoke about the allegation for the first time Friday morning, saying unequivocally: 'This never happened.'" Biden, like Trump, is an inveterate compulsive liar. There's no reason on earth to believe him now, not anymore than there would be to believe Trump.

Some Democrats are asking for Bernie and some of the minor candidates to unsuspend their campaigns and take Biden on. So far no one is biting, some using the shitty excuse that it could cause chaos in the shitty party that demanded such a shitty candidate as their nominee. All the corporate Dems are setting their hair on fire claiming any show of disunity would be playing into Trump's hands. Umm... wouldn't keeping a fatally flawed candidate like Biden on the ticket be playing into Trump's hands? Trump's campaign has many millions of dollars to make sure every voter hears all about this filthy little secret that Biden has endeavored to not address. Kitchener seems eager to present the establishment perspective-- or maybe she's just a gullible fool.

This kind of division within the Democratic Party is exactly what Trump wants, said Democratic strategist Adrienne Elrod, a former spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. The calls for Biden to step down are coming from people who didn’t want him to be the nominee in the first place, she said.

“It’s silly talk. I think maybe it gives the far left or people who were not supportive of Joe Biden something to hang their hat on. But it’s not realistic.”

Reade’s allegations might dissuade some voters from turning out for Biden, but a new nominee would likely be far more harmful to the Democrats’ chances of defeating Trump, said Jennifer Lawless, a professor of women and politics at the University of Virginia.

“It would make the Democratic Party look utterly incompetent,” she said.

Groper

More evidence in support of Reade’s claims could potentially change the Democratic Party’s calculus. But that evidence would likely need to be extremely conclusive and damaging, said Lawless — not just more corroborating accounts, like the statements from Reade’s former neighbor-- but a “smoking gun” more in line with Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape, where Trump admitted to sexually assaulting women.

While that kind of evidence did not derail Trump’s presidential campaign, Lawless says, the Democrats have “held themselves to a higher bar” by harshly condemning Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh for the allegations wagered against them. When former Congressman Al Franken (D-MN) was accused of sexual assault, several high profile Democrats publicly called for his resignation, which led him to eventually step down.

The situation could also shift with public opinion, said Lawless.

“If public opinion polls start to change in the next few weeks, and Biden looks like he is faring less well in some of these battleground states, all bets are off.”

Unless new information emerges, Lawless doesn’t expect the Reade allegations to have a major impact on Democratic voter behavior. That might be different if Biden was not going up against Trump, she says. But evaluated against Trump’s long history of sexual assault allegations-- and the hard evidence of the “Access Hollywood” tape-- Democratic voters concerned with these issues will likely still side with Biden, said Lawless.

“As awful as this is, the worst case for Biden is that he’s now on a level playing field with Trump on this dimension [of sexual assault allegations].”

If “smoking gun” evidence did surface, and pressures mounted for Biden to step aside, he would probably have to do so voluntarily, said Jewitt. Biden has already won too many delegates to lose the nomination in any other way. If that happened, a host of other Democratic candidates would rush to reinstate their campaigns. After the first round of votes at the convention, there would likely be no clear winner, said Jewitt, at which point any other person would be free to jump into the race. (Jewitt has fielded many questions in the past month from people eager to know if New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo could run for president. In this scenario, the answer is yes.)

Based on his age-- 77-- Biden’s vice presidential pick was always going to be particularly important, said Lawless. It’s even more important now. Going forward, the vice presidential nominee-- who Biden has promised will be a woman-- will be called on to defend Biden with regards to these allegations, probably more frequently than Biden is called on to defend himself.

It’s a “tough spot” to be in, Lawless says. But that surely won’t deter prospective nominees. If Biden wins, the vice president will be better positioned for the presidency than any woman in history. Years from now, she could be the one deciding how her party responds to a woman who comes forward to share her story of sexual assault.

The anybody-but-Bernie crowd that owns the corrupt corporate Democratic Party apparatus wants just one thing, for Biden to hang on until they can replace him in a proverbial smoke-filled room with another one of any number of neoliberals, someone putrid who would never win the 2020 primary, a Hillary, Cuomo, Bloomberg, Klobuchar, Newsom... someone who would put voters into the position of having to eat the DNC's shit or be stuck with 4 more years of Trump. The Democratic Party is now a greatly diminished, sad to behold, one-trick pony: heads you lose, tails you lose even worse.