Simmering conservative media speculation about whether Joe Biden will be the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee has boiled over into prime time. Commentator Sean Hannity is openly asserting that party leaders are looking to replace Biden and his hapless sidekick Kamala Harris. Even liberal pundits are sounding the alarm. A cautionary tale about advanced age in The Atlantic opinion column “Step Aside, Joe” may mask real concern that Biden’s gaffes, missteps, and optic disasters, not to mention the complete absence of a coalescing campaign, could result in Donald Trump defeating—possibly shellacking—the Biden-Harris ticket.
Fears about this potential outcome points out the lack of a solid Democrat bench, a good candidate to ride in and save the day. Their best second-tier hope is Robert F Kennedy Jr., a man whose positions fly in the face of the death-spiral progressivism of the contemporary left. As sure as Bernie Sanders was rejected by the party for being too kook-progressive, Kennedy is ostracized from serious consideration because he’s too moderate, too sensible.
With Kennedy ruled out by the party apparatus, one man rises to the fore of speculation, a photogenic hack that Trump must hope will be his general election opponent: California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom. Newsom was an invaluable player when the time came to implement the Democrats’ 2020 Covid-19 playbook. While businesses foundered under now-discredited and pointless restrictions, parents watched the mental health of their children deteriorate under instruction from teachers in Zoom-equipped apartments across the state.
Under Newsom, middle- and upper-middle class Californians who provide the tax base that enables the left to pour billions down ill-considered ratholes begin to flee to more financially hospitable states. While illegal immigrants poured across the border into Newsom’s “sanctuary state,” the specter of racial reparations rose in far-left strongholds like San Francisco, with a call for astronomical spending that would bankrupt even the stupendous coffers of the Golden State if legislated. Newsom, after a bottom-line grapple with the fiscal realities, was forced to turn thumbs down on the reparations idiocy.
But that won’t stop him if elected president—depending on Congressional balance of power—from taking the plans and ideologies of the socialist regime running the county under Biden and bringing them to full fruition. Newsom’s adherence to unsettled climate-change theory will result in the acceleration of the hobbling of American energy production, while big fossil-fuel burners like China and India continue to spew noxious chemicals into the ozone. Racial division will worsen still when the social justice cabinet Newsom would doubtless appoint get their hands on the administrative process.
With Newsom in position as a national policymaker, it’s likely that voters concerned about the overreach of transgender activism ain’t seen nothing yet. While society can sympathize with those suffering from true gender dysphoria, cognitive dissonance abounds when radical transgenderism takes the national stage. In the arena of sports competition, it’s within the realm of possibility that biological males identifying as females will sweep any event that allows such participation.
On the foreign policy front, it’s impossible to imagine bellicose adversaries of the United States and western democracies in general quaking with Newsom as commander-in-chief. Domestically, he’s an articulate spokesman for white-guilt abetted soft-on-crime policy, has shown unwavering support for an undocumented invasion, and has presided over a virtual one-party takeover of California. Don’t think he won’t seek to do the same thing from coast to coast.
There’s no official word that Biden will be forced out, or drop out of his own volition. But influential voices on both sides of the aisle seem convinced that a Dump Biden movement is in the Democrats best interest—with Harris getting the boot too. The ascension of Newsom to the top of the Democrat ticket would herald the triumph of style over substance. The substance would be ruinous for America, and the style, witnessed when Newsom dined maskless at a posh Napa Valley restaurant at the height of the pandemic, contains within it the bleeding heart of hypocrisy.