Opinion | Another blunder by the Democratic Party. By Guillermo López García #OpiniónVP

When? Joe Biden He ran for President of the United States in 2020, doing so with the idea of ​​becoming President for one term. Biden has been Vice President Barack Obama for eight years (2008-2016), but he had no successor. That role fell Hillary Clintonwho lost the 2016 elections despite adverse circumstances Donald Trump. Given the blow that Trump’s victory and his presidency meant for the Democrats, Biden ran as an experienced, predictable politician, but not openly related to the intellectual-political elite of the East Coast, like Clinton. In fact, Biden was able to present in his political career as a senator a closeness to the working classes and a concern for their problems that was much more genuine than in the case of Clinton.

Biden won the presidential ticket, which also included a senator from California, Kamala Harriswhose profile matched him perfectly: a young woman whose parents came from Jamaica and India, respectively. As it was already clear in 2020 that Biden was going to be a very elderly president, two ideas were initially established among citizens: that the president would not repeat his term and that Kamala Harris was a vice president who would have much more power, since probably very soon she would be called to replace Biden or try to replace him.

That was the plan. But then the plan gradually blurred. On the one hand, it began to be seen that Biden liked the position and despite the fact that from the beginning there were his flaws, strange behavior and in short the feeling that the US President did not always know what he was doing. Generally speaking, the President first shelved the idea of ​​​​staying for a single term and then ran for a second term. On the other hand, Kamala Harris lost strength as Vice President and alternative. Her role in these four years has been small, she has been a Vice President without any power or initiative worth mentioning.

So the Democrats decided to nominate Biden, without any discussion, in a primary process in which the president garnered the support of 14 million people, … and then Making a fool of himself in a debate with Trump just months before the election. After that debate, Biden’s gaffes, Trump’s forceful and hurtful phrases, and above all the sense that if Biden continued to campaign it would be about his mistakes and doubts about his ability to stick around for four more years sealed the candidate’s fate and his aspirations to continue.

Biden fell even further behind in the polls, while voices demanding the president’s resignation grew louder among Democrats. At the same time, Trump was the victim of an assassination attempt (a mistake by the United States Secret Service that led to the resignation of its director) which allowed him to strengthen his image. The president and a strong leader, in contrast to Biden’s frailty and old age (it’s not just that he’s that much older than Trump: 81 compared to 78).

It became clear that with Biden, the Democrats were heading for a defeat in which they would lose not only the presidency but also dozens of congressmen and some senators. So the pressure mounted and many leaders of the Democratic Party, who had certified their support for the “undecided nominee” Biden just a few weeks or days earlier, were now calling on him to withdraw. Meanwhile, Biden was on television talking about his defense secretary, lloyd austinAs for the “black man”, I forgot my name.

Biden has hastily resigned just weeks before the Democratic Convention, in which the candidate is chosen. He had to do it now, because if he was nominated as the candidate at the convention, there was no way to back out. But he has resigned not so that there is an open convention, but so that his vice president can take his place. That is to say, the vice president who was deferred during Biden’s first term, who was also rumored not to reappear as vice president in the 2024 election ticket, has been named as Biden’s successor by co-option, because it was too complicated to show that they preferred another candidate, and the Democrats did not want to expose themselves in any way to the spectacle of an open convention.

I don’t know if things will go well for him. Biden’s mistake in trying to run for re-election and the Democratic Party’s mistake in allowing it are now obvious and loud. They have betrayed their voters, to whom they presented the president last year as the undisputed candidate, told them not to pay attention to malicious rumors about his cognitive capacity and his mental flaws, and then hastily removed him from office after a terrible debate. They have put the vice president in his place without presenting him to the voters and without debating with anyone, with the expectation (surely well-founded) that Biden’s support in the primaries would easily transfer to Harris and the vice president would take the baton. Nor have they finally answered the Republicans’ uncomfortable and insistent question: How is it possible that Biden is not eligible to run for re-election but is eligible to be president for the next six months? Shouldn’t I resign now?

Perhaps Trump’s rejection will be enough to give Kamala Harris victory in the November elections, although I personally doubt it, because there are too many flaws in this operation, from the very method of putting Biden in first against all the odds to the very poor method of winning to then hastily removing him and replacing him with a vice president who no one paid the slightest attention to for four years. What is clear is that Trump must be regretting that he agreed to the debate so long ago, which made it possible to demonstrate at least the degree of Biden’s degradation at a time when it was still possible to replace him with someone else.