It has become more than just painfully obvious that Joe Biden is not fit to run for a second term.  What political strategists call optics, however, is a serious impediment for the Dems in avoiding an electoral disaster.  They are obligated to come up with a particularly dignified and gracious way to have a more appealing substitute candidate move to the center of the stage.  This may be even more difficult than it appears.

Much like a sunken ship in the middle of a shallow harbor, Vice President Kamala Harris is a serious obstacle to navigating toward a desirable goal.  Biden has to stay in office as long as he can to delay entering lame duck status — while also announcing his retirement early enough for his replacement to gather sufficient electoral momentum for a victory.

Driving this desire for success is the Democrats' existential need to hold on to power.  Should they lose their grip on the Department of Justice (DoJ), considering lessons recently learned, their virtual extinction may well be in the offing.

Were Vice President Harris worthy of being Biden's successor, then there'd be little, if any, problem.  But she's not.  Her nomination back in 2020 was a major blunder.  It was done solely because she was a woman...and "of color."  Thus, the defect in the left's pre-occupation with race and sex has come back to bite leftists on the derriere.  Back when Harris was California's attorney general, her carelessness and lack of ability were plain to see.  Her rise up the ladder happened anyhow because of her fiercely vicious ambition.

Add to this the profound lack of genuine talent in the Democrats' bull pen.  This kind of explains why they ran with Biden and Harris in the first place — and Hillary in the previous contest.  Media hype alone is no longer enough to get the job done.  Is California's Governor "Hair Gel" the best they've got?  Could be, but there's some serious irony in that Newsom's ex-wife is shacked up with Donald Trump, Jr. (just sayin').  RFK Jr.'s competitive status is both a result of his family name and Biden's weakness.  Kennedy is also, thus far, the only serious challenger actually willing to step up and call Biden out.  He does, however, tend to violate "woke" orthodoxy and other norms, which may limit his possibilities.

And, before we get too carried away, it must be repeated that sixteen months is an eternity in politics.  It was Harold MacMillan who famously said that political aspirations can be easily thwarted by those pesky things called events.  Though unlikely, Biden may still pull something out of his yin-yang to rope in young voters via student loan forgiveness.  Yeah, China may attack Taiwan — but I would guess that if this were really their plan, they'd first wait for Biden to be re-elected (good luck with that).

Meanwhile, Biden's ineptitude and corrupt history are not going away.  Even some of the complicit media have begun to bail.  They leave in their wake an indelible pathology: politicians, who are (unfairly) protected by their "friends" in the media, often have a tendency to develop some pretty bad habits, such as blatantly lying about important issues and selling their influence to the usual high bidders.  As the public wakes up to all of this malfeasance — since they're already realizing that they really are getting screwed — all the old tricks of the trade start falling flat.  The drums of racism and homophobia are falling ever more on deaf ears.  The manufactured hysteria over imaginary weather events and trends, in an effort to eliminate carbon-based energy along with the comfortable standard of living that comes with it, is coming up against increasing skepticism.  The tyrannical attempts at banning gas stoves, furnaces, and water heaters is logically generating profound public anger.  Never mind that the electrical substitute for powering natural gas appliances is itself produced by over 75% carbon-based and nuclear fuel.

Hence the particularly high interest in the political contests coming next year.  One possible scenario would have Biden being diagnosed with some convenient medical condition at exactly the right moment.  But then he would still have to stay in office — lest Harris become president.  Earlier predictions had Harris getting bumped up to the Supreme Court to get her out of the way.  Compared to the biologically ignorant Ketanji Brown Jackson, Harris looked like a winner.  But that ship has sailed.

Making all of this at least sort of problematic is that there remains a cadre of true believers standing behind Joe and Kamala...and the twisted belief that white racism and bourgeois prosperity are the true evils of our time.  These folks are mostly affluent beneficiaries of unique American freedoms, who were radicalized in college and before.  However, the rest of us have been educated in the college of real life.

Image: Mobilus In Mobili via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).