OPINION:
President Biden will not be on the November ballot. With each new Biden family revelation and new poll finding Donald Trump will beat Mr. Biden like a drum, the inevitability of Mr. Biden stepping aside grows.
Yet Mr. Biden will not step aside before the end of the Democratic primary season. Instead, without real opposition, Mr. Biden will be poised to accept his coronation at the Democratic National Convention in August in Chicago.
Democratic strategists now plotting the Biden coup see this uncontested primary season as an essential element of a winning November strategy. As Richard Nixon once advised, run to the right to win the Republican nomination but run back to the middle to win the general election.
In this case, by avoiding a hotly contested Democratic primary cycle with numerous candidates trying to out-“woke” one another, the eventual ticket that runs in November will not be burdened with extreme positions in a primary campaign anathema to the American center.
How will Mr. Biden will be persuaded — or forced — to step down in favor of a brokered backroom deal Democratic convention? Mr. Biden wants a grand legacy of his White House days and full pardons to keep him and his family out of prison.
On the legacy front, Democratic strategists will confront Mr. Biden with the reality that if he gets trounced in the general election by Mr. Trump — as polls say he will surely win — Mr. Biden’s place in history will be beside Jimmy Carter as the most hapless president of the modern era.
If Mr. Biden still resists this pressure, key leaders within his party and the legacy media will take Mr. Biden down and thereby clear the path for a fresh ticket. They fear a new Trump presidency as surely as Brutus put the knife to Caesar.
On the pardon front, Mr. Biden will wait until after the November election and before he resigns to pardon not just the prodigal son Hunter but also his brother James, who is generally regarded as the consigliere in the Biden crime family. As for Mr. Biden’s pardon, he will quietly step down before Inauguration Day and let Kamala Harris do the dirty deed as part of the deal.
Vice President Harris certainly won’t lead the replacement ticket in November. Her numbers are almost as bad as Mr. Biden’s, and she has the worst quality a politician can have: unlikability.
Instead, Kamala will agree to go quietly into the same bad night as her boss. The quid pro quo will be the promise of dibs on the next Supreme Court vacancy.
The dream ticket among the Biden coup crowd os most likely Michelle Obama-Gavin Newsom.
Michelle is the anti-Kamala. She has a robust favorability rating that crosses party lines and a relatively low unfavorability rating.
Michelle will be expected to bring back the Black vote, particularly Black women, now running for the exit from Mr. Biden. She will also appeal to the more moderate elements of the Democratic Party who remember with revisionist history fondness the mediocre presidency of Barack Obama.
Mr. Newsom will be a youthful face. The California governor’s broad mission will be to ensure no progressive defections to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or millennial or Generation Z defections to either Mr. Trump or Mr. Kennedy.
Any effective Republican counter-strategy must smoke the Biden coup out early. This means making Mr. Biden vigorously deny he will drop out while making candidates waiting in the wings — particularly Mrs. Obama and Mr. Newsom — deny they will participate in the Biden coup.
Voters should be rightly outraged if the Democrats try to replace the Biden-Harris ticket without proper vetting of the candidate field in a Democratic primary season. Republicans should get that message out early and often; it’s as true as the primary season is long, and voters, particularly independents, will be alienated by the Democrats if they attempt such a cynical ploy.
Second, voters must be messaged to separate any positive feelings about Michelle Obama from the reality of an Obama presidency that was a hot mess on everything from the economy to foreign policy. The mantra: The highly unpopular “Bidenomics” is fruit of the poisonous “Obamanomics” tree.
Third, Mr. Newsom must likewise be tagged early and often as the poster boy of the “woke” progressive movement. His inclusion as the vice presidential candidate must come with an appropriate pound of MAGA flesh from a country’s whose middle is sick to death of the Californication of America. It cannot be said too many times that Mr. Newsom was the mayor of one of the worst “woke” and failed cities in our country, San Francisco.
Finally, if Michelle Obama really does take on Donald Trump in the November election, this will reduce an otherwise two-pronged Republican attack strategy based on Mr. Biden’s toxic personality and his reckless and feckless policies to a one-front war over competing policy visions. This is an extremely winnable war for the Republicans.
Middle America, where the median voter lives, is sick to death over the takeover of this country by radical Democratic progressives destroying everything from our economy, society and political system to, most dangerously, our borders and national security.
For a Republican win, Democratic strategists must not be allowed to obscure the hot, steaming policy excrement of a “woke” policy agenda inside a fancy moderate Michelle Obama wrapping.
• Peter Navarro served in the Trump White House as manufacturing czar and chief China hawk. This column originally appeared at www.peternavarro.substack.com.
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