‘Interesting times’ continue to unfold

Two weeks after this space discussed staying away from national politics, here we are again for the third week in a row. 

Hard to argue it’s without reason.

There’s a saying, more of a curse — traditionally attributed to the Chinese but never actually sourced — that says, “May you live in interesting times.”

Indeed.

After weeks of pressure from within his party — and from the few traditional conservatives remaining — to do so, Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race in a July 21 statement, citing his intention to devote his energy to serving the rest of his current term.

This is the first time a sitting president has abandoned a run for re-election since 1968, when Lyndon Johnson dropped out the race after a single primary.

We’re just a bit closer to the finish line this time.

By withdrawing, Biden will be our second consecutive one-term president following his former opponent, Donald Trump, who is attempting to become only the second non-consecutive two-term president in American history following Grover Cleveland, who won elections in 1884 and 1892.

If Trump is successful, that will make Biden both the Lyndon Johnson and the Benjamin Harrison of his time.

In his statement, Biden threw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris, officially endorsing his running mate to succeed him.

Harris made her candidacy, and her intention to defeat Trump, official later that day.

Perhaps predictably, this forced pivot has some in and around the Trump camp crying foul, with the candidate himself calling Biden “a threat to democracy” in a July 21 post on Truth Social, the platform Trump founded for himself when he was tossed from Twitter and Facebook after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.

It seems a good time to note, though the GOP made Trump their presidential candidate for the third election in a row at last week’s national convention in Milwaukee, Biden was only the presumptive Democratic nominee, having swept a series of virtually uncontested primaries earlier this year.

But you’re not voting directly for candidates in the primaries, folks. You’re voting for convention delegates. And, according to the Democratic Party’s rules, all of President Biden’s pledged delegates are now released and free to vote for whomever they want, though the party advises them to “in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.”

And that means Harris, who not only got Biden’s endorsement, but those of many of the most prominent Democrats in the country — including New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul and senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand — within hours of Biden’s withdrawal, should inherit most or all of Biden’s delegates headed into the Aug. 19 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

To wit, Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, a pledged Biden delegate, told The Press his decision is already made.

“The delegates have all been released, so all the delegates are uncommitted,” Dinowitz said. “But it is my intention to vote for Kamala Harris.”

Biden’s decision to recede into the annals of presidential history has another significance to the greater Riverdale area, as, assuming she is nominated, Harris will be the first-ever woman of color to topline a major party’s national ticket.

And that is a bit more reflective of who and what greater Riverdale is than Biden, or Trump, could be.

Of course, there are those who wonder, perhaps rightly, whether a President Kamala Harris would govern significantly to the left of Biden in some areas, particularly crime. But, for now, the message from the national Democratic Party is of an almost entirely unified front to stop Trump from achieving his Cleveland Dream, as it were, of spending another four years in the White House.

Because despite what he might say now, proof exists Trump knows very well what the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is.

The 920 pages of that plan are readily Googleable, by the way. No attempt is being made to hide it.

Its implementation would be hideous. 

And those would be the kind of interesting times in which this space has no interest living.