The Democrats did the right thing in dumping incumbent Joe Biden from the 2024 presidential ticket – and they have been rewarded for it. They may have thought it would bring pain, but actually it brought a surge in the polls, surprising some and underlining for others that there is no bad time to do the right thing. But their decision to anoint Kamala Harris is not so clear and to understand why, we must see why getting rid of Biden worked so well.

Bluntly, it’s because both parties were running candidates manifestly unfit for office.

I know in politics it’s tempting to declare anyone you don’t like unfit for office, and I could make some pointed remarks about Harris. In fact I will. I’m pretty much a Calvin Coolidge Republican, or indeed a Whig, libertarian on economics, hawkish on geopolitics and conservative on metaphysics, and Harris is none of the above. But before I get to trashing her platform and questioning her character, I must emphasize that just as Trump is clearly unfit for the Presidency on moral grounds (and for having only the loosest imaginable grasp of economics, geopolitics, the Constitution or almost anything else and being proud of his ignorance), so Biden was absolutely, glaringly, unfit on medical grounds, in ways that Harris is not, whatever her defects of policies and personality.

Indeed, it worries me that Biden’s still in the White House, since a man too physically and mentally frail to campaign for the most important political office in the world is clearly too frail to discharge its duties. That he might be shaken awake at 3:00 am to make a decision about missiles heading for North America, or about a nuclear cloud over Tel Aviv, is a terrifying prospect.

Also, since Biden manifestly could not run a corner store at this point, someone else is running the American Executive Branch and we don’t know who. My guess is Jeff Zients, not my administrative version of Charlie Brown’s fictional Joe Shlabotnik but a real person and really Biden’s chief of staff. It’s always a powerful position but today he’s probably the de facto president –  so if you didn’t recognize him, it’s a problem.

Possibly Kamala Harris is the one who’s really in charge. Frankly, I think anyone who has observed her up close should be reluctant to bring big decisions to her, which is worrisome, especially if they’re not reluctant, and I’ll get to that point. I certainly worry that we don’t actually know who’s in charge. But as I say, running Harris is not obviously the appallingly irresponsible act that running Biden was, and the polls have responded accordingly.

Vale, Joe Biden

I think one reason people are struggling to come to terms with the new situation and grasp its implications was the long-standing, stubborn resistance to acknowledging just how wretched a candidate Biden was. Clearly his own party, and even his closest aides and family, were stunned at his disastrous June 27 debate performance, though they had no real excuse since they dealt with him every day. It goes to show, among other things, that fact-bending zealotry is far more prevalent than conscious deceit in public affairs. And more dangerous.

It wasn’t just them. I remember one prominent Canadian pundit, generally noted for his acerbically penetrating thought, exploding in fury at suggestions that Biden had been wandering in a senile fog at the June 14 G7 meeting. And you can still find much commentary online, of the CNN “Biden was giving thumbs up to skydivers, not wandering in viral G7 video” variety, that has not aged well.

Speaking as one who has seen several close relatives succumb to dementia it gave me no pleasure to insist, as I did at the time, that I know what it looks like and was seeing it. But there is such a thing as Trump Derangement Syndrome that blinds people to the failings of anyone who might conceivably obstruct his path to the White House (and a parallel, inverted syndrome that obscures any defects in Trump or any virtues in his critics).

Varieties of derangement syndrome

Now Republicans, you may say, suffered no such delusions about Biden. They and especially Trump hammered on and on, often in Trump’s characteristically repellent fashion, about Biden’s mental incapacity. But they too were oddly blinded, by their own inexplicable conviction that Trump is a giant among men, a brilliant campaigner, a superb chief executive and a moral exemplar. That he was narrowly leading Biden would not sustain this fantasy if Biden were not somehow a formidable campaigner rather than a mediocre career politician who’d recently lost his marble.

Remember that right afterward, Trump insisted that the real debate story was his brilliance not Biden’s face-plant. And you’d think nobody else could possibly believe it who’d seen even part of their performance, though you might also think nobody close to Trump would dare tell him he was being egotistical. His performance was adequate, in some respects exceeding the very low expectations he’s created for himself, but there’s no way to make it sound like an achievement.

The same must be said of his 2016 victory. It was surprising, even astounding, but only because he was such a dreadful candidate in so many ways. And the only reason he won is the only reason he looked formidable as recently as last month: The other party managed to find almost the only person in America who could have lost to him, Hillary Clinton, also conspicuously and deeply morally unfit for high office. That the Democrats should have opted in three successive elections for Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Joe Biden suggests that something is almost as wrong with their party as the choice of Donald Trump, Donald Trump and Donald Trump suggests about the GOP.

Ah, you say, that’s in the past. Now the Democrats are running Kamala Harris. And they are, though watching the response to Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention I found myself wondering how many in the party weren’t secretly gnashing their teeth at the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution.

Again, I’m not an Obama fan. I thought his presidency failed many ways, including fostering the angry discontent that carried Trump into the White House. But not everyone who doesn’t share my view of the world is automatically a scoundrel, a moron or both, and Obama can speak coherently and inspire enthusiasm – even if it’s got to be hard even for his fans to remember what all the excitement was about in 2008. But I digress.