The Really Bad News for Democrats? Despite His Debate Debacle, They Are Still Stuck With Biden | Opinion

The debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump on Thursday evening made history, but not because of its unprecedented early date. Presidential debates have been a staple of every election cycle since 1976 and the one thing that you could always count on was that the two parties and all their operatives and media cheerleaders were all united in saying that their own candidate was great and their opponent was terrible.

But not last night. There have been bad, even disastrous debate performances in the past. President Gerald Ford liberated Soviet-occupied Poland in 1976 and President Barack Obama looked like he was bored and was clearly beaten by Mitt Romney in the first of their three debates. But in neither of those cases, did the spinners wave the white flag and concede that their candidate was beaten.

The President's shaky voice, intermittent confusion, inability to make coherent points or to use all the time available to him to attack Trump or defend his record was so glaringly obvious that not even those paid to give the Democratic take on things were able to pretend that it wasn't a disaster.

Even the partisans on the panels on CNN and MSNBC led off their post-debate by conceding that the 81-year-old Biden failed to do the one thing he absolutely had to do: defuse questions about his age and diminished performance. Worse than that, they immediately moved on to discussions about whether or how Biden could be replaced as the Democratic candidate.

The Left insisted that Trump didn't win and asserted that he lied non-stop with his incessant boasting and hyperbolic rhetoric about his administration, though Biden's lies about Trump praising neo-Nazis at Charlottesville in 2017 and insulting America's war dead was just as bad if not far more egregious. And they also claimed that Biden prevailed on the substance, though that is arguably just as false.

Yet few on the Left bothered to conceal the panic they felt about a debate that confirmed the country's worst fears about Biden's condition and gave the lie to all those pols and media hacks who have been claiming that in private, Biden is sharp as a tack, even if in public, he often appears befuddled and visibly infirm.

Indeed, the only thing comparable to the shock and dismay exhibited by the corporate liberal media after the debate was their equally shocked reactions to Trump winning in 2016.

This would be terrible news for any presidential candidate but it's a catastrophe for an incumbent who is cratering in the polls as far as his approval rating and losing to Trump.

But the really bad news for Democrats is that the chances of replacing Biden with someone else are slim no matter how many of them are now screaming for it on their social media accounts.

What those demanding a candidate switch are forgetting is that this is not some far off moment in America's past when nominations could be determined by regional party bosses meeting in proverbial smoke-filled rooms. There are no such bosses anymore and no realistic mechanism for toppling an incumbent president who already has the nomination sewed up. Both major parties have been hollowed out largely in the name of democracy as primaries replaced state conventions which could be easily rigged by the local party machinery.

Even when the entire apparatus of a national party is opposed to a prospective presidential candidate—as the GOP establishment was to Trump in 2016—they had no power to prevent him sweeping to the nomination on the basis of primary victories in which ordinary voters have the final word.

In theory, the Democratic Convention that will meet in Chicago from August 19-24 could choose someone other than Biden. But most of those selected as delegates are Biden loyalists and are in most cases obligated to vote for him.

There's only one person who can decide that Biden won't be the nominee and that is the candidate himself.

But everything we know about Joe Biden—his arrogance, contempt for critics and loathing of his opponents, not to mention the fact that he waited several decades for a series of unlikely events that let him achieve his lifelong ambition—all makes me think that he will never give up the chance for another term under virtually any circumstances. Nor can one imagine that he would take kindly to senior Democrats demanding his withdrawal even if there were any such senior party members willing to do that.

It's possible that his inner circle, particularly his wife, could finally concede that their efforts to cover up his infirmity have failed and that it was time to cut their losses in the hope that an alternative might do better against Trump. But Jill Biden seems as obsessed with having another four years in the White House as her husband.

There will also be the blind partisans on his staff and among the party rank-and-file who will revert to denial about the debate. They will insist that the memory of the debate will soon fade. They will tell themselves that Trump's sentencing in a New York City court next month on the bogus charges on which a partisan judge and process convicted him will be a gamechanger. They will also deny the flood of negative polling and keep telling themselves that Trump can't win. Or that only Biden can beat him.

Moreover, once the dust settles from the debate, they'll have to remember that none of their alternatives are certain to do better than Biden. They'll also have to deal with the problem of how to replace Biden with someone other than the even more unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris. Dumping the first women of color to be vice president will be unthinkable for a party that is obsessed with woke identity politics, no matter how incompetent Harris may be.

All that will likely be enough to allow Biden to weather any potential party rebellions. As long as he not only wants but thinks he deserves another term in office despite his terrible record and obvious decline, he will remain the Democratic standard-bearer. That and not the debate is the really bad news for Democrats.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org, a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow him @jonathans_tobin.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.