We’re in the “dog days” of summer. The name is redolent of weariness, exhaustion, dog-tiredness. Politicians, being steamed in the heat of a Washington July, yearn to get away for recess, just as everyone else longs to reach the beach.
It’s also now, in the second summer of any presidential term, that electoral politics can be seen most clearly as the endless grind that it is. Four months before we even vote in midterm congressional elections, and six or seven months before presidential aspirants reveal themselves as official candidates, a small lineup of hopefuls and the hopeless begin to hint that they’re running for the White House.
Hang on, one is tempted to cry, we’re still closer to the last presidential election than to the next one! Are we really going to start churning down this road again so soon?
The answer is, “Yes, we are.” The 2024 race has been coming into sharper focus ever since senior Democrats began saying in public a few weeks ago what they’d been saying in private for many months — that President Joe Biden is a disaster and obviously too old even in his first term, let alone fit for a second term.
The party of the Left is racked with anxiety that it may be stuck with a leader who is fumbling every issue he must deal with — who has lost not just a mental step but a whole flight of stairs. It is possible that he will be protected from intraparty ouster by political etiquette, although Democrats rarely let propriety derail their pursuit of power. But even if Biden were to be elbowed aside, who would replace him? Kamala Harris? Would she be better? Hardly.
It’s not only Democrats who are in a quandary about their choice of champion in 2024. Again, hardly! Former President Donald Trump is signaling more strongly than at any point since his 2020 defeat that he intends to run again. This news causes at least as much consternation as excitement among Republicans. A recent New York Times-Siena College poll found that only 1 in 3 people approved of Biden, but it also revealed that the lamentable incumbent actually beats Trump 44-41.
The former president told New York magazine, “People want me to run.” But “people” is vague and doesn’t include many in Trump’s own party who see him as perhaps the one nominee who could snatch electoral defeat from the jaws of probable GOP victory.
Many conservatives on Capitol Hill confirm that they’re steering strategically — trying to avoid picking Scylla as their presidential nominee while also avoiding the Charybdis of downward spiraling support among MAGA fans for the party and its nominee.
But the emerging possibility is that the nation will be offered a replay of 2020. Can it be that a country as great as this one should provide itself only with such alternatives? Must we skip back, like a scratched vinyl record — reference to antique technology not coincidental — to where we were five years ago? The idea that America will be obliged to choose between Biden and Trump is calculated to deepen, not lift, summer ennui.
