Will Michelle Obama run? The runners and riders in the bull pen are lining up to replace Joe Biden.  After a regrettable performance in Thursday’s debate, much of the Democrat press corps is demanding that Joe Biden step aside. Last night, the New York Times ‘Editorial Board’ said that, ‘to serve his country’, the President must go.  Democrats have led America to the brink of the abyss.  The party has for too long prized polite lies over uncomfortable truths.  Markets are readying for a Trump victory.  If the octogenarian President were to throw in the towel, who could possibly replace him?

‘You don’t turn back because of one performance’, said Gavin Newsom after last night’s debate. ‘What kind of party does that?’ He knows the answer: the kind of party that wants to win and thinks it’s more likely to do so with him at the helm. Elected Governor or California five years ago, he’s a tried and tested politician who has been hard at work on the campaign trail, having been lieutenant governor before and Mayor of San Francisco before that. He’s been tipped for so long that he jokes about the theory that he is running a ‘shadow campaign’ ready to step into Biden’s shoes at precisely moments like this. His friends say that his more likely aim was the 2028 presidential election, when he’d be 60 years old (a relative whippersnapper compared to Trump and Biden). But Republicans have always said his real agenda is a summer coup. Newsom has certainly been behaving like a trainee president, travelling to visit Netanyahu in Israel and Xi in China. As co-chair of Biden’s re-election campaign he has been very much on the campaign trail. Might the coordinator become the candidate, as Margaret Thatcher for Keith Joseph? ‘He’s been one hell of a governor,’ says Biden. ‘Matter of fact, he could be anything he wants. He could have the job I’m looking for.’ A great many Democrats now agree.

Well, the Americans like their dynasties. For a time, Michelle Obama was the bookies’ favourite to take over from Biden; in February, her odds were 8/1, versus Gavin Newsom’s 12/1 and Kamala Harris’s 15/1. In the last few months, though, Mrs Obama has tried to put to rest rumors that she wants the top job. ‘As former First Lady Michelle Obama has expressed several times over the years, she will not be running for president,’ Crystal Carson, director of communications for Michelle’s office, said back in March. But if her party begged her, might she? The former first lady has been notably missing from the Biden campaign trail. While Barack has hosted glitzy fundraisers alongside political heavyweights like George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Barbra Streisand, there hasn’t been a peep from Michelle. Supposedly, she’s frustrated with the Biden family over how they treated her close friend Kathleen Buhle during her divorce from ex-husband and now-convict Hunter Biden (son of Joe). Might it be Obama-Buhle 2024?

What about Big Gretch? That’s apparently the nickname given to Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan Governor, by her constituents. Whitmer was elected to lead the Great Lakes State in 2018, when she turned Michigan blue for the first time since 2006, and was last year tipped to challenge Joe Biden in the Democratic primary. She had built a national profile by delivering the Democratic response to the State of the Union address by then President Trump in 2020. In June 2023, a couple weeks after Biden tripped and fell at a graduation ceremony at an air force academy in Colorado, Gretchen denied that she wanted to run against Biden. Did seeing Biden fall not tempt her to try and take the reins? ‘No!’ she said. Perhaps the Governor has changed her mind after watching last night’s debate… She has a memoir coming out (called TRUE GRETCH) in July. A presidential run would shift some copies.

Believe it or not, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump’s opponent in 2016, is now in fourth place in the running to take over from Joe Biden. Could there be a rerun of that famous, terrible race? Earlier this month, the Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker suggested that Clinton should replace Harris as Biden’s veep. Hillary had just given her endorsement to George Latimer, a centrist Democrat standing against the left-wing Jamaal Bowman. The former first lady clearly still has a keen interest in the internal politics of the party she used to lead…‘This election is existential’, Hillary said back in May. ‘I mean, if we don’t make the right decision in this election in our country, we may never have another actual election’, Hillary said back in March. Was she talking about stopping Trump, or Biden? (Latimer won his race earlier this week.)

How could the vice-president be overlooked? The White House hails her as ‘the first black American and the first South Asian American’ to be elected to the position – and at a time when the Democrats are bleeding black voters, the Democrats may be reluctant to ditch her. But her polling is awful, worse than Biden’s, and she’s seen as to his left – so not likely to do much to stop middle America going for Trump. 

The New York Times turns on Joe Biden.  Politics is a fickle business. One day, the idea that Joe Biden is unfit to be president is unheard of; the next it is throw the bum out.  No greater example of this can be found than in the comment pages of the New York Times. Overnight, the great-and-the-good of liberal opinion has turned on their former hero, delivering a series of withering verdicts on the 81-year-old White House incumbent.  ‘Joe Biden failed at his key task,’ began Josh Barro ‘showing voters he’s still cut out for the presidency.’ ‘Biden cannot go on like this’ declared Frank Bruni; Jamelle Bouie called him ‘raspy and stumbling.’ He ‘looked ancient and sounded lost,’ concluded Clinton enthusiast Michelle Goldberg. ‘There will now be a new chorus of cries for him to drop out, and I’ll be joining it.’ ‘He sounded like a dying humidifier’ cried Matt Labash, ‘or my great-grandfather giving his last will and testament.’ Asked for the most pivotal moment of the debate, he suggested ‘Biden’s brain freezes and non sequiturs’, adding ‘Even if he grew stronger as the night wore on, Biden seemed like he was auditioning for the glue factory.’  Bret Stephens was even harsher: ‘His very presence on the stage felt like a form of elder abuse. On the paper’s podcast, Ross Douthat started with this blunt summary: ‘We should just say Biden is too old to be running for president of the United States.’ But perhaps the most damning indictment of all was delivered by Thomas Friedman, a close confidant of the President. If you are not in Thomas Friedman's good books, you have lost America.  He wrote:  “I watched the Biden-Trump debate alone in a Lisbon hotel room, and it made me weep. I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime – precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election.