Why doesn’t Biden believe in Harris?

There are a bunch of reasons that, despite the enormous pressure being exerted by most of his own party, by big donors, and by the fact that nearly two-thirds of Democrats want him to drop out, Joe Biden may decide to stick it out and remain the nominee.

I want to focus on one here, which is that there have been numerous reports that Biden doesn’t think Kamala Harris can beat Donald Trump. This helps explain an otherwise inexplicable aspect of this whole affair, which is all the handwringing about the chaos that’s supposedly going to erupt if Biden drops out. The only way that narrative makes any sense is if Biden doesn’t ask his delegates to nominate his own vice president, who is legally able to take over his own presidential campaign and all its resources, to be the Democratic presidential nominee.

There isn’t the slightest doubt that if he were to drop out while giving Harris his full endorsement, she would get the nomination. So the whole “what’s your Plan B smart guy?” retort of the Biden dead enders is based on the implicit or maybe in some cases unconscious premise that Biden isn’t going to do this.

And he might in fact not do it. And why would he not do it?

I think the answer to that is that Joe Biden is actually old enough to have some memory of the America of the 1940s, and that for someone of that age it’s very difficult, psychologically speaking, to imagine an America that could elect a Black woman as president. This isn’t some sort of personal racism or anything like that: it’s just an understandable failure of imagination, the product of having spent all of one’s childhood and youth and a indeed most of one’s adult life in a nation where that really wasn’t a realistically imaginable thing. I’m 17 years younger than Biden, and I don’t think that was a realistically imaginable thing for most of my adult life — and I grew up in an America of the 1970s that was already in those terms a radically different country than the America of the 1950s, when Biden was a teenager.

I even see this in the comments here at LGM, where people take a fatalistic attitude toward racism and misogyny, and say American won’t elect a woman president, even though Hillary Clinton lost a coin toss election eight years ago after being the nation’s most prominent hate object for the previous 25 years, and having her campaign ratfucked by Donald Trump’s best Russian buddies and James Comey and the Emailz! Experience. I see this in the minimizing of the fact that America elected a Black president 16 years ago already, with claims that he was some sort of once in a lifetime transcendent political talent, so you can’t take much solace in that.

I think this is bullshit, and in these regards America is a fundamentally different country than it was thirty or forty or seventy years ago, (for one thing, it’s much much less white, which is why Trumpism exists in the first place) and that Kamala Harris probably — probably — would have a better chance of winning the election if Joe Biden were to withdraw from the race and give her his unambiguous endorsement.

But I’m pretty sure Biden doesn’t see things that way at all, in no small part because he’s a man from a different time, as we all are to some extent, except this is much more true for really old people than for everybody else.

Which is one big reason why things are where they are this morning in America.