After the debate, the deluge

Following Biden’s horrific debate performance, the Democrats have an enormous problem, best captured in the name of a recent TV series: Schitt’s Creek. Paddles for sale! Democrats should max out their credit cards buying them.

Every sentient Democrat should be in full-scale panic. It’s not that Trump’s debate performance was all that great. It wasn’t. Everything people think about him, for better or worse, was on full display.

The problem, obviously, was Biden’s performance. It’s less that Trump won and more that Biden lost — badly — not just the debate but potentially his ability to stay in the race. Come on, man. Our president is in rough shape, cognitively and physically, and his party can’t hide it. Everyone who watched the debacle could see it. They know two things. It wasn’t a temporary glitch; it has become a permanent feature of the president’s situation. And they know problems like his only get worse. They only question is how quickly. No sentient voter thinks this guy could last another four years as president. If he stays in the race, the Democrats won’t need election attorneys as much as they elder-abuse attorneys.

Given this self-imposed mess, Democrats face five big problems. None are easy to resolve.

First, President Biden has won enough delegates to win the convention’s first ballot. That means you cannot get rid of him unless he agrees to step down. Or Jill Biden does.

Second, there is no coherent party leadership to force him out and replace him with someone else. That’s a big change from the two parties’ structure a few decades ago.

Third, even if Biden drops out, it will be hard to coalesce around a single replacement candidate. A fight for that spot would be extremely damaging to the party’s chances up and down the ballot in November, and it would be even worse because it comes so late in the cycle.

Fourth, Kamala Harris. The dreadful number two in the White House stands in the way of an effective replacement. She will naturally demand to step up as the presidential candidate. But she is a constituency of two: herself and her husband. The rest of the party, indeed the rest of the country, doesn’t want her. They loathe the prospect. They’d rather send her to Central America to find the root causes of the immigration crisis… and have her stay there.

Fifth, if the Democrats manage to figure out a way to ditch Kamala as the nominee, they will pay a very heavy price. They will surely lose a constituency they must have to win: black women voters. They won’t vote for Trump; they won’t vote at all. It doesn’t matter than Governors Whitmer (of Michigan), Shapiro (of Pennsylvania) or Polis (of Colorado) would all be stronger candidates than Kamala or Joe in the general election, if they had they won a fair primary fight months ago. That didn’t happen. Joe stayed in and nobody could force him out. (Did Obama try? Seems like he didn’t, or at least didn’t try very hard.) Mr. Slick Hair from California is a sure loser. And a convention fight would be a bloody mess, yielding only a Pyrrhic victor.

Paddles for sale! Cheaper by the dozen.