JOHN PODHORETZ: Gone Biden Gone.

So, yes, Biden had to go. But the solution here is probably no solution. I’m not saying Kamala Harris can’t win the presidency against Donald Trump. The Lord is the only one who knows, and given how He’s altered reality for the past 25 days, I wouldn’t put it past Him to keep throwing us for loops because, let’s face it, we’re sinners and we’re bad and we deserve everything we’re getting. We have the greatest country on earth, the greatest constitution, the greatest economy, the greatest everything, and we’ve ended up fostering a political culture so generally nauseating that even Screwtape must be feeling a little sorry for us.

But left to her own devices and without some form of divine or demonic or newsy intervention, Kamala Harris is exceedingly unlikely to win the presidency. I say this because we saw her in action as a candidate for a year in 2019. She was so extraordinarily bad at it she had to drop out of the race in December before voters—any voters—let her know in no uncertain terms how much she stank up the joint. Had it not been for Biden’s pledge to pick a token vice president—I mean, when you say you’re going to pick a woman of color, you are literally tokenizing the office—she would likely be a relatively obscure member of the Senate.

Why do I say this? Because she’s been a relatively obscure vice president. She has not risen even to the barely discernible standards of the world’s least consequential office. Moreover, to the extent that people even think about her, they  just don’t like her very much. We know this because polling tells us so, not because Fox News tells us so. Her approval rating is 38.6 percent. That is very bad. It’s so bad that Donald Trump’s approval rating is higher.

What the Democrats who are now doing a St. Vitus Dance of ecstasy over the change in their fortunes are not reckoning with is that the entire appeal of the Democratic party in 2020 was its seeming stability as opposed to Donald Trump’s unsteadiness in a crisis. Well, the country has been in a crisis for 25 days as it reckons with the meaning of its infirm president, and you know which party looks unstable? It’s not Trump’s party.

In contrast, as Podhoretz writes at the conclusion of a post from yesterday titled, “Trump Is Now a Three-Fer,” “He’s the closest thing we have to an incumbent president now—and the candidate of change. And Kamala Harris has some major work to do to overcome the instability that has emanated from her party during the most unstable moment in American politics since the Florida recount.”