Who Is the Democrats’ Plan B?

By David Talbot, columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

By David Talbot, columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

Who will replace Joe Biden? The Democratic establishment and its allied media outlets have been in a frenzy about this existential question since special counsel Robert Hur’s damning report about Biden came out last week. While some media pundits simply froze in fear about the looming prospect of a second Donald Trump term, other political reporters got right to the point, asking, Who does the Democratic Party have ready on the bench? 

The answer is that the party has very limited Plan B options when Biden resigns from the race. The Democratic National Committee is much more adept at driving rival leaders from the party and silencing outspoken ones than at developing a new generation of popular officials.

Despite President Biden’s rapidly declining status, he will try to play kingmaker after racking up enough delegates in the largely uncontested Democratic primaries. The real horse-trading to name his successor is taking place already, well before the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August. The authoritarian DNC wants to avoid the “chaos” of an open convention (read: “democracy”) as much as possible.

But, as I said, Biden and the Democratic elite have very few choices. 

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Vice President Kamala Harris is even more unpopular than the president. When Biden drops out, “everyone you know [in the Democratic Party] would run,” a senior Democratic official told Business Insider last week. “The VP scares no one.”

Harris’s leading rival should be California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has been positioning himself as Biden’s loyal understudy for some time. The problem is that Newsom is loath to take on his “good friend” Kamala Harris, the nation’s first female and minority vice president, a challenge that would not be popular with the party’s black voters. The California governor also might not play well at the national level. In his surrogate debate with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in November on Fox, DeSantis came off as a bully, but Newsom also lost points, looking like a slick, over-prepared, know-it-all and a loyal supporter of Biden’s failed immigration policies. Newsom also struggled to defend his state’s discredited COVID policies, apologizing yet again for his hypocritical, Boris Johnson-like attendance at a swanky, maskless dinner party in the wine country. 

Newsom is sharply intelligent, but as I’ve pointed out here, he’s a creation of the wealthy and powerful, and that bubble aura limits his political appeal.

Among the other well-known Democratic officials touted to replace Biden at the top of the presidential ticket are Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The problem is that none of them are household names – not venturing into national debates like Newsom – and they have their own liabilities. As white candidates, they also would be confronted with the Harris problem.

The smart move for the Democrats would be Michelle Obama – the nightmare scenario that Republican pundits have shuddered about for a long time. 

Last week, National Review editor Rich Lowry dismissed the Michelle Obama choice as a “fantasy.” Karl Rove, the political advisor to President George W. Bush, also dismissed the former-first-lady option as nothing more than a figment of the far right’s paranoia. 

“No – look, [Michelle Obama] hates politics,” Rove told Varney & Co. on the Fox Business channel. “Read her autobiography. She didn’t want her husband to run for the [Illinois] State Senate. She didn’t want him to run for the presidency. She’s not a political animal.”

“This is a weird obsession of the conspiratorial right – and it’s just lunacy, pure lunacy,” Rove opined.  

But this denial about Michelle Obama by Republican “wise men” is whistling past the graveyard. Yes, she has never been elected to office. Yes, she seems out of the box. Yes, she’s more of a brand name than a conventional political animal. But this is what would make her an ideal DNC choice. She’s the supreme insider while looking like an outsider. Her presidency would be Barack Obama’s fourth term – an extension of Biden’s reign.

Former Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who positioned himself as a Beltway outsider, was quick to recognize Michelle Obama’s dangerous appeal. 

“The main obstacle stopping the Democratic Party is they have a Kamala Harris problem,” Ramaswamy told Fox News on Saturday. The Democrats can’t replace Biden with the vice president, he said, because she is politically weak. “She didn’t make it to the Iowa caucus in the year that she ran, right, even within her own party, let alone [build a] broader popularity in the country.”

But, as a black woman, Michelle Obama “checks the boxes,” he said. “If race and gender are your basis for selecting someone for a job, and the identity of your party is tied to that temple of identity politics, then … I do think Michelle Obama offers them a convenient path out of that [Kamala Harris] problem.” 

Peter Navarro, the former trade advisor to President Trump who was recently imprisoned for contempt of Congress, would seem to have more pressing problems these days. But, according to an opinion column he wrote in January for the Washington Times, he lies awake at night worrying about a Michelle Obama-Gavin Newsom ticket.

Biden’s Body Double

But would Michelle Obama accept the nomination? Well, in recent months she has said the right things. In January, she told podcaster Jay Shetty that she is “terrified” about the next election “because our leaders matter. Who we select, who speaks for us, who holds that bully pulpit. It affects us in ways that sometimes I think people take for granted. The fact that people think that government – ‘nah … does it really even do anything?’ – and I am like, God, does government do everything for us, and we cannot take this democracy for granted, and sometimes I worry that we do.”

In the fall of 2022, while publicizing her new book The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, Michelle Obama offered President Biden muted praise, saying he is “doing the best he can.” But she stopped short of endorsing another Biden run for the White House. “You know, I, I – I will have to see,” she told ABC News.

Michelle Obama is a presidential contender because the US political system is broken. The two established political parties no longer speak for most people, and can’t even groom future leaders. They are corporate entities, not political organizations that represent the common good.

Instead of celebrity appeal – or sound and fury signifying nothing – America needs a president who understands the dangers and challenges, and opportunities, facing us. Who can boldly take us to that new frontier.

The Democratic Party is no longer the political arena in which to find such a leader.

David Talbot is the author of Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy
Years and The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, books which have shaped the American narrative about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.