EVEN THE NEW YORK TIMES Thinks Biden Should Drop Out of the Race

  

We first started hearing this via Ed Morrissey and since he is proverbially part of the Townhall/Salem ‘family’ we thought we would start with him:

Mr. Morrissey wrote the ‘GET. OUT. NOW.’ part. The actual headline is:

‘To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race.’

Mind you, this is not some random op-ed writer, or even a single regular columnist. This is not even David French. This is the entire Editorial Board’s words.

It reads pretty much how you would expect. They tell you Trump is basically the second coming of Hitler. There is lots of concern for protecting Democracy, and we will repeat what we said this morning:

As we often say, whenever a Democrat says something is a ‘threat to democracy,’ just substitute the phrase ‘threat to the Democrat agenda,’ and it will make much more sense.

Then they lay into Biden: 

Voters … cannot be expected to ignore what was instead plain to see: Mr. Biden is not the man he was four years ago.

Also:

The president appeared on Thursday night as the shadow of a great public servant. He struggled to explain what he would accomplish in a second term. He struggled to respond to Mr. Trump’s provocations. He struggled to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his lies, his failures and his chilling plans. More than once, he struggled to make it to the end of a sentence.

They butter Biden up a lot, which is probably a good strategy to persuade him. They say in paraphrase “You did a great job Joe. Now do the patriotic thing and step aside.” They even say that despite all of this, they would vote for him. But …

It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.

They go on to beg the Democrats to go to Biden and try to make him see reason. They also go back and say those evil Republicans should be removing Trump as the nominee because he is Hitler, dontcha know? Because God forbid they don’t ‘both sides’ the issue.

Look, we are not saying we find their argument compelling. What seems newsworthy to us is who is saying it. Ed Morrissey and a commenter joked that it was a bit too late for this:

But we respectfully think this is extremely significant. When the New York Times takes an official position, the Democrats listen.

Some other reactions:

Seriously, stay in the race until the end! You can do this, Joe!

(We aren’t fooling anyone, are we?)

And for the record, ‘Qubester’ seems likely to be feigning his support for Biden, too.

The NYT literally said they would vote for Biden over Trump.

This author of course prays that Joe Biden lives a long life; that he has a sudden infusion of wisdom that includes a sudden respect for the Constitution and especially its first two amendments; and, failing that, we hope he has an early retirement, possibly forced under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

Last night’s debate happened and the emperor was shown to be wearing no clothes.

We think Ken had a typo and he meant to say ‘Not even a unanimous convention…’ 

And that is the rub, isn’t it? What do we actually get if Biden steps aside? Who is going to replace Biden? Kamala Harris is the official heir apparent as vice president. She was literally selected to replace him if he should leave the presidency for any reason.

But the political problem for Democrats is that she is an absolutely awful politician. She had pretty much zero impact in the primary campaign and we doubt she flipped a single vote for Biden in the general election in 2020. She was picked because of her demographics and not because she was a good campaigner.

But if not Harris, then who? This author despises Newsom but we think he is one of their stronger candidates. But pushing aside a ‘woman of color’ for a blow-dried white guy is a bad look for demographically-obsessed Democrats. They will not judge him by the content of his character. Indeed, we don’t think they could replace Harris with any white person because of their obsession with race. And the only person we can think of with any national prominence that isn’t white is Michelle Obama, but this would literally be having her make her first run for political office be President. Yes, she could promise to lean on her husband a lot, but will voters think that is enough? And would she even want to do it? It’s a gamble.

The only other choice might be Hillary Clinton. Yeah, someone observed that the Clintons are like political herpes, because they never seem to go away. But does she have it in her to run again? And would Democrats want a person who not only lost to Trump, but told everyone Trump stole the election from her?

And we’re not sure how procedurally realistic any of this is. We admit, we haven’t familiarized ourselves with their convention rules.

Our guess is that if Biden can survive the weekend, these calls for him to step aside will subside and maybe Democrats will put up bumper stickers that say ‘Vote for the invalid. It’s important.’

But, of course, we could be wrong.

Finally:

Heh.