Okay, so Joe Biden is proving such an embarrassment that he can't be trusted to remain plausibly coherent for the 14 long months until the election.  And Kamala Harris, the Great Intersectional Hope, is so transparently phony that voters are abandoning her.  Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is no longer the anti-Hillary alternative that he was in 2016, and his cranky persona is wearing thin.

So what's a member of the Democrats' gentry — the educated professional classes — to do?  Steven Hayward of Powerline, an astute observer, thinks Elizabeth Warren is the next candidate who will take the lead.

Twitter video screen grab (cropped).

Pollster Mark Murray points out that only 9 percent of Democrats say their mind is made up; Warren has emerged as the leading second-choice candidate if Biden stumbles, and Warren's supporters show the highest intensity/enthusiasm level, which is always something successful campaigns build on. You can almost sense the media starting to get behind her. Biden has the look of Bob Dole in 1996: an old party warhorse that Democrats might accept, but without great enthusiasm[.]

She's lefty like Bernie, but with an intellectual veneer that comes with having been a tenured professor at Harvard Law School.  That she snagged that prestigious job by faking Native American heritage is her first fatal flaw.  Blacks, who constitute a quarter of the Democrats' vote in presidential elections, are simply not going to turn out for someone who appropriated victim status and the preferences that accompany it today.  It's not just an "uphill" struggle, as The Hill delicately puts it; it's a futile struggle.

Black turnout either makes or breaks a Democrat running for president.  This skinny, white, old lady is just not going to inspire a lot of African-Americans.

And now, seeking feminist credibility, she is turning on the male half of the population:

.@SenWarren zings … men:

“We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men. In fact, we’re not here because of men at all.” pic.twitter.com/CE2pjR1Xyk

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 18, 2019

Miranda Device elaborates in The New York Post:

Elizabeth Warren made the political calculation this week that she doesn't need men to win the presidency.

"We're not here today because of famous arches or famous men," she told a rally in Washington Square Park Monday night.

"In fact, we're not here because of men at all," she said, emphasizing the "m" word like an expletive.

Great. Then she won't mind if men don't vote for her, nor women who like men.

It's a losing strategy, taken straight out of the playbook of Hillary Clinton, from whom, reportedly and inexplicably, Warren has been taking advice.

Millions of American women showed in 2016 that they weren't prepared to vote for Clinton just because she had a second X chromosome.  White, non-college-educated women in particular voted almost 2-to-1 for Donald Trump in 2016.

Most likely, they didn't approve of the denigration of their menfolk as "deplorables" abusing "white male privilege" when the truth is that the males they love are doing their best, even if jobs are scarce and they're dying of overdoses.

But Warren does play well with the elites of the Democratic Party.  She's almost certainly popular in faculty lounges across America.  But while the educated elites control a lot of the levers of power in the party, they don't vote in numbers sufficient to elect a president.  The media love her because she's well spoken and is a woman.  But I don't think she can win without the enthusiastic support of blacks.