The position of vice-president in the US is a peculiar one. The position carries with it no power, nor substantive daily duties, other than a largely ceremonial one of presiding over the senate and that usually only occurs when a very close vote is expected and the vice-president takes the chair in case it becomes necessary to cast a tie-breaking vote. The real requirement of the role is to be able to take over in the event that the president should die, resign, be removed from office, or is otherwise incapable of carrying out their duties. So the main criterion for being selected to the position is confidence that the person is capable of taking over if necessary. While there are no real qualifications for being president in terms of experience, and serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) has shown us that someone totally unfit for the office can attain it, one would hope that the person picked to be the vice-presidential nominee would display some reassuring qualities that they could rise to the occasion if need be.

However, the last election brought to the fore another task that the vice-president has that had been seen as purely ceremonial but became central to SSACFT’s plan to overturn the election and that was presiding over the certification of the counting of the electoral college votes. Vice-president Mike Pence refused to entertain the idea that he had the power to challenge the votes of states that SSACFT lost, and allow alternate slates of electors. On December 23, 2022, Congress passed a law to rectify any ambiguities and close any loopholes that might be exploited in the future.
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During her campaign challenging serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SACFT) for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley managed to outlast all her rivals. She said quite a few negative things about him but all somewhat obliquely to avoid alienating the MAGA cult. When it came to the age issue, she said that the first party to nominate someone under the age of 80 would win the election. This number was clearly carefully chosen to be ambiguous to avoid being an obvious disqualifier for SSACFT, who is 78 years old. As long as Joe Biden was in the race at the age of 81, she could try to have it both ways, highlighting her being young while not explicitly saying that SSACFT was too old. With Biden leaving and the 59-year old Kamala Harris becoming the presumptive nominee, that prediction that was meant to advance her own candidacy, has become a little too uncomfortable for her.

Like almost all the other Republican politicians who at some point ventured to criticize him, she eventually crawled and groveled back into his and the party’s good graces. But the primary numbers showed that there is a sizable number of people both Republican and non-Republicans who disliked the idea of SSACFT as the party’s nominee and hoped that her long-shot bid could stop him, and not all of them are following her back into the fold. An organization calling itself ‘Haley Voters for Harris’ have set up a PAC and claims to represent some of those Haley supporters.
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For the longest time, serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) and his cronies in the Republican party have been going on and on about Joe Biden’s age, mocking him mercilessly. As the site Electoral.vote.com Taegan Goddard writes under the heading “What goes around, comes around” that the time has come when Democrats can turn every one of those attack lines back against SSACFT.

All year, Donald Trump has been harping on the fact that Joe Biden is the oldest president ever and in poor health. And if reelected, Trump decreed, Biden would be well into his 80s and declining. Now that Biden is out of the way, there is renewed scrutiny of Trump’s age and health. Trump is now the oldest presidential candidate in history and has a history of heart disease and obesity. He has not released his bloodwork or other detailed information on his health and people are starting to demand it.

There is no requirement for a candidate to release medical information, but a refusal to do so could cause voters to wonder why. In the case of Trump, Democrats will soon be harping on the fact that he is the oldest candidate in history and not at all transparent about his health. In 2015, Trump’s doctor, Harold Bornstein, released a letter saying that Trump would be the healthiest president ever—even more so than Teddy Roosevelt. Bornstein later revealed that Trump had dictated the entire letter to him, word for word. Bornstein died (of embarrassment?) in 2021.

In 2018, Trump’s then-doctor, Ronny Jackson, noted that Trump’s coronary calcium score was 133, up from 34 in 2009. CNN’s medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, said that a value of 133 meant that Trump had heart disease. Trump also released his weight. At 244 pounds, he is clinically obese. Since then, Trump has not released any medical information. Trump has said he aced cognitive tests, but has not produced any reports from any doctor stating that. Trump also has increased risk of Alzheimer’s, since his father had it and there is a genetic predisposition to it.

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My biggest reaction to Joe Biden announcing that he was quitting the race was relief. Each day had been a little tense, wondering whether he might do or say something that would give further fodder to the endless speculation that he was too old and losing it. Suddenly, with his exit, that focus shifts to serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) whose cognitive decline will now be under greater scrutiny now that he will be compared to the far more youthful-looking, energetic, and articulate Kamala Harris.

In speaking to the election campaign staff at their headquarters in Delaware yesterday, Harris did not disappoint. She gave a rousing speech that lasted about 18 minutes, with Joe Biden watching remotely and chiming in, that laid out the themes she will likely pursue during the campaign.

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Kamala Harris has moved rapidly to consolidate her position as the most plausible person to replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, with prominent Democrats all lining up to endorse her candidacy All the people who had been floated as possible alternatives have either ruled out running or have directly endorsed her. The very top leadership of Charles Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House of Representatives have not as yet done so (nor has former president Barack Obama) but that may be because they do not want to give the impression that the party is steamrolling the process and not giving the rank and file a chance to voice their preferences. But Nancy Pelosi has done so.

In many ways, this is not unlike the way that the UK selects its prime minister. The party insiders pick the leader of the party who then becomes the prime minister should the party win the majority of seats. In the UK, the party leader only contests their own constituency but that is seen as enough of a mandate to be the prime minister of the whole country while in the US, the nominee, however they are selected, still has to gain the support of voters in the general election.
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With Joe Biden’s exit, suddenly the presidential election process gets a major shot of adrenaline. The attention immediately shifts to the process of the Democrats selecting another nominee at its convention in August 19-22 in Chicago. A party’s nominee is always selected at the party convention by a majority of delegates although due to the primary process, almost all the delegates are committed to specific candidates even before the convention starts and so there is little suspense. In this case, Biden already had a majority of delegates. With his exit those delegates become free agents and the process becomes wide open, although the process of finding a new nominee is fairly straightforward.

On the first ballot, a winning nominee would need to secure the votes of a majority of Democrats’ roughly 4,000 pledged delegates. If no candidate won a majority on the first ballot, Democrats would continue on to a second ballot, in which so-called “superdelegates” would have an opportunity to vote.

Superdelegates are mostly senior Democratic party leaders, and they would go to the convention not pledged to any candidate. With the roughly 700 superdelegates added to the voting pool, the winning candidate would then need to secure about 2,300 delegates to capture the nomination.

Although superdelegates would make up a relatively small share of the delegate pool, they could play an important role in choosing the nominee. Their support for a particular candidate would speak volumes and could sway fellow delegates.

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He announced today that he will no longer seek the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

Although his decision is being described as a ‘shock’, this did not come to me as a surprise. Ever since his poor debate performance created doubts about his cognitive abilities, there has been an increasing number of calls from his supporters that for the good of the party and the country, he should quit. The whole process became a sort of sad deathwatch, knowing that the inevitable was near but not knowing when. I felt that Biden was going through some of the Kubler Ross five stages of grief, namely denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, and that he would at some point bow to the inevitable.

It would not have been easy for Biden to reach the acceptance stage. He is a lifelong politician whose ambition to become president was thwarted multiple times before achieving it late in life. He also had a pretty successful presidency, and must have wanted to continue it. But his tenure was marred by several bad moves, the biggest of which was his support for Israel’s horrendous treatment of the people of Gaza. That clearly angered many young people who can see injustice much more clearly than adults can and are less willing to compromise and make excuses for it.

So now the process of finding a successor begins.

I have never seen a presidential race like this one. On the Republican side you have an absolutely awful liar and narcissist grifter who has somehow managed to captivate a large number of supporters and bully his entire party leadership into groveling before him. On the Democratic side, you have a process in which they have less than four months to find a new nominee and rally support for them. The experience of other countries that do not have such an insanely long election process suggests that this timetable is feasible, though for Americans it will be novel.