At some point in the near future, President Joe Biden will announce he has Parkinson’s disease and, true or not, it will make life much simpler for the Democrats to shuffle him away.

Since the debate, the Democrat power brokers and their thugs and toadies in the deep state have been frantically looking for a way to dump Joe in a way that Joe could possibly find psychologically palatable, and Parkinson’s could be that answer.

Because even if it is not exactly true (the symptoms do match up, though,) it provides the cover needed to make the switch as he will be leaving because he was “very recently diagnosed” – emphasis on the 'recently' to explain why he is only bowing out now – with a degenerative disease that makes a second term physically impossible.

Unlike a rather standard slide into amorphous senility, having an actual identifiable relatable and serious disease allows him to hold his head high and proud as he leaves.  There is no humiliation involved – it’s just a tragic fact of life that could befall anyone and, a political plus, could even generate a ground swell of sympathy for Biden.

It’s also why the word “Parkinson’s” has been mentioned so often of late, and it would go something like this:

President Biden announces that he has Parkinson’s disease, a fact that was only confirmed to him recently (possibly after his reported January meeting with a neurologist.)  During the announcement, Biden admits he has been struggling – a bit, and only on occasion, and never when it really counted for the nation – with certain symptoms he had put down to mere aging and/or controllable with some minor medications.

And it’s done; even Lady Jill Macbeth– who loves running the country even more than she loves her doctorate – could possibly shed some of the stink of the elder abuse she has been committing over the past few years by saying something like:  “We all worked together, we did the best we could, we thought it was so important for the nation to have a decent, caring, blah blah blah president that we were all willing to make the sacrifice but the doctors tell us we no longer can…”

It is possible Biden does not smooth the way for Harris, but unlikely.  First, the logistical challenges of ballot changing to another candidate is fraught with difficulties, and the legal issues of transferring money donated to the Biden/Harris campaign to someone else are convoluted to the point of near impossibility. 

It would look better for Biden – and the party – for him to release his delegates and  actually have some kind of “Zoom” primary type thing, or at least “get to know the other candidates” debate process before the convention – that could remove some of the stink of the obvious backstage–election interference, if you will – of the process.  But the timeframe and the noted complications and the public and intentional passing over of the first black and first female vice president would be problematic for the progressive base.

And while Harris is not performing against Donald Trump in the polls much better than Biden, actually a bit worse, the party may think it could improve that standing.  With Biden, they know they cannot stop the decline.

If Biden does not opt for an auto-Harris elevation, he can still use Parkinson’s as a humiliation shield in his “I’m not running” announcement.  The politics become very muddled and complicated, but it may almost look better for Biden to not appear to be playing politics and would make the whole endeavor look a little less planned, a little less brazenly manipulative, a little less sordid.

And planned and manipulative and sordid – no matter what happens, no matter the spin, no matter the truth, no matter the fallout – it would be.

Thomas Buckley is the former mayor of Lake Elsinore, Cal. a Senior Fellow at the California Policy Center, and a former newspaper reporter.  He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy and can be reached directly at planbuckley@gmail.com. You can read more of his work at his Substack page.

Image: Parkinsons disease by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free