Normally, American parties are little more than vehicles for their leaders. The Democrats, who will be celebrating their party convention in Chicago tomorrow, have presented themselves very differently in the past week.
It was the first joint appearance since the great mutiny. On Thursday, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris appeared in Maryland, about an hour away from Washington, and Biden cracked a few jokes. Well, he tried. He knew he looked 40, he said, but he was actually older. Biden put on a mischievous smile. “For a long time, I was just too young, because I was only 29 when I was elected. And now I’m too damn old.” There was laughter and cheering and clapping. But at the end, the hall chanted: “Thank you, Joe.”
Putting on a brave face, one would say clichédly, is a bad idea.
Because that is exactly what the 81-year-old political veteran Joe Biden had to experience. For weeks there had been unrest in his party, the chorus of voices urging him, the president, not to run again became louder and louder. Donald Trump and the Republicans seemed confident of victory after the historic presidential debate and the assassination attempt on their candidate. The scenarios for a “landslide” in which Trump would have won against Biden by a landslide were discussed more and more frequently among election experts. It was leading Democrats, especially the long-time Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who kept the debate about Biden’s withdrawal alive. In the end, the president resigned to his fate.
The Democrats and Shakespeare
It was a brutal maneuver, one reminiscent of Shakespearean dramas. But one that seems to have paid off so far. Harris has overtaken Trump in several polls. She has even taken the lead in some swing states where the election will be decided on November 5.
Good face, bad game – big victory?
A new Democratic Party will gather at the party convention in Chicago starting Monday. It is likely to be a big party, with hardly any open disputes, even though Joe Biden is said to still insist internally that he could have won against Trump.
But this summer of 2024, the Democrats have shown something that is unusual for American parties: esprit de corps and discipline. The Democrats have overthrown their own president in order to still be able to achieve the great goal of stopping Donald Trump. The Democrats, of all people. A party that many associate with the words idealism, perhaps even chaos, has presented itself as something very different: a coolly calculating power machine.
Usually every four to eight years, candidates fight first for the leadership of the party and then for that of the country. Whoever makes it into the White House is the leader of the party. There is sometimes grumbling and gossip, but in the end the president is always right. For a long time, American parties were seen as vehicles and election campaign machines for those who won the primaries. At least for the Democrats, this is no longer the case for the time being.
Development began eight years ago
It is a development that has been apparent for several years and would probably have been unthinkable without the person of Donald Trump. It all goes back to 2016, the year of shock. At that time, the party elite had gathered around Hillary Clinton. The party believed that its time had now come. Barack Obama, who had defeated Clinton in the primaries eight years earlier, also supported his former rival and not his then vice president Joe Biden. Biden did not even run in the primaries.
The party was sure that Clinton was the right person to beat Trump. And didn’t she deserve it? She, the former Secretary of State, Senator and First Lady, would of course beat a sexist with no political experience – a colossal miscalculation that has become deeply ingrained in the party’s consciousness. The Democrats in 2024 are still a product of Clinton’s defeat in 2016.
Four years ago, the Democrats wanted to make up for the disgrace. This time, the party’s analysis was very simple and very cool: We’re staying in the middle. A moderate candidate is best suited to oust Trump from the White House. After a brief high for Bernie Sanders at the beginning of the primaries, black voters gave Joe Biden a landslide victory in the South Carolina primary. That made it all clear. Shortly afterwards, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Elisabeth Warren ended their campaigns and the moderate voters supported Biden from then on.
The Democratic Party has no elected leadership body that makes the big decisions in critical phases. There are no powerful presidiums or executive boards like in German parties. Rather, in the chaos of the primary campaign, there are different currents – from the far left to moderates to the more conservative wing – all fighting for the direction of the party. That is exactly what happened four years ago, when a small group of moderates first fought each other and finally agreed on Biden to stop Bernie Sanders. They were convinced that a candidate with a left-wing profile could not defeat Trump.
This year, it was not a small group that was wrangling over the future of the party. Pretty much everyone who is up for re-election in the House of Representatives and the Senate spoke up. Many elected officials feared that they would have been dragged into the abyss with Biden at the helm. For a long time, there was speculation as to whether a group of leading Democrats might have to hold a conversation with Biden. If Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and a few others were to influence the president, he would have to give up.
There was apparently no such discussion in a large group. Instead, there was a weeks-long battle of attrition, at the end of which Biden, who was suffering from Corona, quit via tweet.
Sam Rosenfeld, an American party researcher, says that anti-Trump sentiment “was the glue and engine behind the huge voter turnout in 2020 that brought the Democrats to power.” But the question remains: what will become of this power machine if Trump is defeated again? How do those who see themselves as the good guys define themselves in a time without the bad guy?
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
