07/22/24

Good morning! It’s Monday, July 22nd.

National Hammock Day, and that’s all well and good but yesterday was National Ice Cream Day and honestly, for the first time in history… that’s relevant to the news.

And now, the news.

Biden Steps Up by Stepping Down

-via The White House, Twitter, Wall Street Journal, CNN

Let’s start with traffic and weather on the tens and twos.

Just kidding. Imagine! Imagine if I was like… hey, let’s start with weather.

No, there is one story and one story only today.

After three weeks of party infighting following a truly disastrous debate, President Joe Biden made history on Sunday and announced that he will finish his term but drop his re-election bid.

He announced it in a letter, saying, “It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

In a follow up announcement, he announced that he was fully endorsing Vice President Harris. An endorsement that was followed by many others.

So as things stand right now, as I record this, Vice President Kamala Harris is our presidential nominee.

There is so much going on right now, so let’s go piece by piece.

How did we get here?

It started with the debate, but as I’ve said for the last two weeks,

What happens next?

Such a great question. When you know, let me know.

This has never happened in history, at this point in the race. In theory, the closest parable would be LBJ dropping out, but that was in March. Only one state had had their primary before he made his decision. President Truman dropped his bid after one primary. So dropping a reelection bid is rare, but dropping at this point in the race has never happened.

So there is the question of delegates and let me be totally honest and tell you I don’t know exactly what happens next. But let also be honest and tell you that anyone else who tells you they know exactly what happens next is lying.

Or a writer for the Simpsons.

Because the Simpsons predicted this – Lisa Simpson, in a purse suit and pearls, matching exactly what Harris wore as she was sworn in as VP, becomes the first female president. The president before her? Trump.

Anyway, we don’t know exactly how this will work but here’s some broad strokes.

When you vote for president, you vote for delegates. On your behalf, the delegates cast a vote for the candidate. The party dictates how many delegates each state gets, and the math on which percentage of delegates each candidate gets based on how much of the state they won.

Those delegates are promised to your candidate.

There are also unpledged or superdelegates, which are two words for the same thing. Republicans say unpledged, Democrats say superdelegates. These delegates are people close to party leaders. They are promised to no one. They vote for whomever they’d like. That’s why I’ve never been able to be a delegate, because I would vote for Rebecca Welton and people would be like – she’s not a real person (debatable) and she’s British (okay but she’s also a chameleon and I also believe her if she told me she was eligible for the presidency).

So right now we have an open convention.

Every delegate is up for grabs. Pledged and super.

If you don’t know a lot about Kamala Harris right now – please don’t worry. You will. She’s going to have to make a case for those superdelegates as well as pledged delegates.

In the convention, as the rules always are, the first group to vote will be those 4,000 pledged voters. I’m going to continue to refer to them as pledged, even though they are not pledged to anyone at this point. But they’re a different group than the other delegates.

So they’ll vote however they’re going to vote. I expect, based on the support Harris has already gotten today, that she will take the W in the first round. If not, the next round of voting will be the pledged voters plus 700 superdelegates.

But at the end of that convention we’re going to have a presidential nominee.

I personally think it’ll be Harris, and the real question is… who’s going to be her VP? We’ll see, I guess!

Do you hear that little joy in my voice? It’s because this changes everything and I firmly believe, if we can act like adults and standing firmly behind Harris, what happened on Sunday changed everything. This is winnable. In fact, in just the first five hours of her campaign, ActBlue, a Democratic fundraising group, has seen $27.5 million in donations.

And if we are looking for consequences for actions…

First of all, Donald Trump donated $5,000 to Harris’ California AG campaign in 2011 and another $1,000 in 2013.

So there’s that.

They also planned an entire campaign around running against Biden. Those ding dongs had no backup plan! Their own thing was “he’s old and hard to understand.”

Uh oh – cause Trump’s 78 and can’t hardly hold a sentence with two hands.

Trump is a criminal. He is a felon who has also been found liable of sexual assault.

Kamala Harris is a young, accomplished attorney who has spent the last two years, since Dobbs, talking about why reproductive rights matter. Ever since the Supreme Court allowed Roe to fall, every single time, without exception, that abortion has been on the ballot, voters have voted to protect that right. And while Trump’s pick for VP is on mic saying “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” Harris, like Biden, has been clear about wanting to secure abortion rights.

Trump, ya doofus – to quote the woman that’s going to absolutely stomp you in November… “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you."

As far as whether Harris will see anyone stepping up against her, so far no has launched a challenge. For reasons truly unknowable, a couple weeks ago, Marianne Williamson launched her THIRD bid for president just in this one race – but that’s obviously not serious.

As a personal gift to me, Joe Manchin, aka Joey Manchy, announced he’s thinking about running as a Democrat. As a reminder, he is not a Democrat. He kind of never has been but he already said he was an independent because no one wanted to sit with him at lunch. Which also explains why he’s not running for reelection in the Senate. Dude can’t win his state but suddenly thinks he can be president? Come on!

I hope he doesn’t, because this is a serious time for serious people. But should he decide to roll his ironed jeans up, park the houseboat, and run for president, know this… it will be my life’s mission to bully him out of it.

And I know this episode’s going long but I do want to talk about President Biden.

In this moment, we may want to have conversations about why President Biden took so long to drop out of the race. And we may want to have conversations about the infighting we saw amongst the Democrats.

But that’s neither here nor there.

President Joe Biden did something exceptional on Sunday.

The best we can do with our lives is try and leave everything just a little better than we left it. He ran in 2020 because he wanted to do just that. In the middle of grief, on top of a lifetime of grief, President Biden did something amazing and truly saved democracy from a second Trump term.

Months later, we saw the truth of Donald Trump – a small, terrible man who unleashed an insurrection that saw, for the first time ever, a confederate flag being run through our nation’s capital. That is who Trump is.

Someone who is running to take away your rights – to bodily autonomy. To choice. To democracy.

The President believed he could win again and it was hard to talk him out of it because he saw what a threat Trump poses and believed he was the only one that could be him.

The President has been of service to this country since 1972 and on Sunday, July 21st, he secured his legacy as someone put his own desires aside for the greater good.

That letter he sent was an act of service that I don’t believe many others would have been able to do.

It on us now, who believe in a democracy that should work for everyone, and a possibilities for this country that we have yet to attain, to do every single thing we can do to make sure that Donald Trump never, ever, wins another election.

Kamala Harris has my full support and, absent anything related to We Are Voters (because that’s still nonpartisan), I will do everything in my power to get her elected.

We’ve got four months.

Let’s get it done.

And that’s it. That’s the news.

I’m proud of President Joe Biden.

Who loves ice cream almost as much as anything else. Loving ice cream is like 90% of his personality.

So much so that he chose to make this truly historic announcement on National Ice Cream Day.

And because you also know when to choose your moment… I’m proud of you.