The stab in the back

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, there's no mystery about why the mainstream media have been pushing the idea of removing Biden from the Democratic ticket.  It's worth reiterating the point:

The reason the media hacks are desperately trying to keep the dump-Biden meme alive is that the media's main interest is to maximize page views (which increases what they can charge for advertising).  Drama and controversy get clicks.  And if they did somehow get the party to remove Biden as its candidate, they'd have a feast -- a convention full of infighting and personality clashes as the various contenders for the nomination fought it out, plus endless opportunities for posting the "Democrats in disarray" screeds they love.  Don't be fooled.  None of this is in the party's interest, nor the country's.

However, the fact that a steady trickle of Democratic politicians have also been pushing for Biden to drop out -- and the fact that they've been doing it publicly, maximizing the damage to future party unity assuming Biden remains the candidate -- suggests that something else is also going on.

Based on reports at the Daily Kos and other places, it seems to be the big monetary donors to the party who are really the ones pushing this.  They're the ones urging politicians to take an anti-Biden stance, and there have been threats to withhold donations from the presidential campaign if Biden remains the candidate.  But why would they be doing this?

Big political donors are by definition wealthy, and a billionaire who votes Democratic is still a billionaire.  Biden has been talking about starting to roll back the decades of disastrous tax cuts for the wealthy which have brought us huge deficits and obscene levels of inequality.  And he has a track record of actually doing what he says he's going to do, despite the limitations imposed by the narrow Senate majority and the Republican-controlled House.  The billionaires have already had a mild foretaste, as increased IRS funding starts to bring in money from wealthy tax cheats.  And as I explained here, there are solid reasons for believing the Democrats could win a landslide victory this year, enough to gain solid House and Senate majorities and to enable a re-elected Biden to achieve more fundamental change -- including restoration of somewhat more reasonable tax rates for the wealthy.

So the billionaires, including Democratic ones, are getting worried.  They want Biden replaced by someone less determined to bring about real change.  His bad debate performance, and the ridiculous media overkill coverage of it despite his later successful public appearances, furnished a pretext -- and don't forget that most of the media are themselves ultimately owned and controlled by the wealthy.

They are surely not ignorant of how damaging this is.  I can't imagine anything more helpful to Trump's chances of winning the election than Biden dropping out.  Unless the party managed to immediately unify around Harris, there would be weeks or months of petty squabbling as various contenders vied to become the replacement candidate.  Most of the commonly-suggested options (Newsom, Whitmer, etc) are hardly known outside their home states and would need to be introduced to the country from scratch.  Many Democratic voters would be resentful that the clear verdict of their primary votes had been set aside in favor of some insider-controlled process.  If Harris were passed over, there would be a risk of disastrously alienating black voters, a critical part of the party's base.  Republican officials in several states are already gearing up to throw up obstacle after obstacle to getting a replacement candidate's name on the ballot, setting up legal fights that would go before the Trumpified Supreme Court.  And the Republicans would quickly come up with new lines of attack to smear a new candidate just as badly as Biden.  They always do.

Even the fact that this pointless fake controversy is dragging on and on is damaging.  Every prominent Democrat's words urging Biden to drop out will appear in Republican attack ads when the election gets close.  Every day wasted talking about this nonsense is a day not spent laser-focusing on the Republican threat to abortion rights and on Project 2025.  Trump could hardly ask for a more valuable political gift than opponents as self-sabotaging as this.

To be blunt, the oligarchical parasite class, including its Democratic members, is so determined to prevent any moves back toward a saner tax policy that they're prepared to wreck the Democratic presidential campaign and risk another four years of Trump in power.  If, as I think is still the most probable outcome, Biden remains in the race and is re-elected, he will owe it to the country not only to squeeze the bastards dry via tax policy, but also to push for real campaign finance reform to permanently break the power of big money to bring about this kind of manipulation.

And if the pressure becomes too great and Biden does drop out, then he needs to (a) do it as soon as possible so as to bring this whole idiotic discussion to an end, and (b) resign from the presidency itself, so that Harris has a few months of incumbency before the election, hopefully preventing a disastrous battle for the nomination between a passel of political dwarfs.  But even this wouldn't prevent all the other harmful consequences I mentioned above.

Thanks to blogger Green Eagle for this post which helped finally clarify some of these issues for me.

Update:  Further supporting evidence -- several politically-active billionaires have openly said that they're determined to stop not just taxes but other policy plans Biden has set for his second term.  The bad debate was never more than a convenient pretext.  This is almost as scary as Project 2025.  A group of oligarchs are plotting in plain sight to take down the president of the United States because he intends to rein in their greed and power, and all too many Democrats have fallen for it.