DOESN'T ANYBODY HERE KNOW HOW TO PLAY THIS GAME?

Hot Air contributor David Strom asks, "Do the Democrat Elites WANT Kamala to Lose?"  He opens with a disclaimer.

It sounds crazy, and perhaps it is. But there is a lot of suspicion that Democrats are either throwing in the towel on the presidential race or that members of their elite are so unenthusiastic that they want her to lose.

There could be many reasons why that might be so, and many more why that seems crazy to me. But I am not a mind-reader, so all I can do is look at the facts as they present themselves and then try to figure out what is going on.

It's possible, as he notes, that Dementia Joe is still capable of being peevish and resentful, those being his base traits when he had more than two brain cells to rub together.

The case for Joe Biden wanting Kamala to lose is most compelling. Harris, after all, helped push him out of the campaign, sidelined him, and made him look like a weak fool. It was obvious that Biden didn't want to budge--he said so often and loudly enough--and it was similarly obvious that he resented being pushed out.

Many people speculated at the time that Biden's endorsement of Harris hours after the obviously written-for-him letter bowing out of the race was a big screw-you to the Democratic Party. Harris was thought to be a terrible candidate without a chance of winning, and Biden put our his endorsement separate from the statement pulling out of the race, and was likely not filtered by an establishment which had been pushing for an open process.

Part of the deal in getting Biden out of the race was that there would be no criticism of Biden--at all--and that he would be presented as a George Washington figure putting country above ambition. And Biden is enforcing the deal--every time anybody mentions Harris separating herself from Biden, out he pops with a bear hug to draw her back in. And when he is unhappy with her he goes further--dons a MAGA hat or steps on her messaging.

But when he gets into the internal jealousies among the Donks, and there are many, he loses sight of the path of play.  Yes, there is plenty of tabloid-worthy material on the campaign trail, and it no doubt cheers up the Militant Normals who follow everything from Pajamas Media, Town Hall, and the rest of the insurgency.

Obama loves power, and Kamala Harris is even more brain-dead than Joe Biden. Her being in office would extend his reign for another four years. He has deeply infiltrated the Biden administration (look at the ranks of administration officials), and his people are running Kamala's campaign in an uneasy alliance with Kamala's team.

I think this was pure elitist arrogance, not sabotage. Obama has always aspired to be at the top of the elite and achieved that goal in 2004 when he burst onto the scene at the DNC. He has never looked back.

Bill Clinton's gaffe (?) is the most mysterious. Biden hates Harris, Obama is now in an elite bubble and can't understand ordinary black men, but what is Clinton going on about? He basically blamed Kamala Harris for Laken Riley's death and called for the Great Replacement to become a reality.

Perhaps, though, the problem is with Democrat operatives who can't unwind a game tree.  Recall, dear reader, the way the nomination changed hands.

Tell me the Democrats haven't just eased the sitting president out of office and made the sitting vice-president the interim president without the formality of invoking the 25th Amendment.  Yes, Old Joe made a trip to the Lyndon Johnson presidential library today, where he offered some new end runs around the Constitution, the better to keep Democrats in power, because it's only democracy when they win.

That is, if the substitution is a winning move.  "Carville: ‘Excitement’ around Harris has to be tempered with ‘realism.’"  Yes, all the predictable pop-culture cultists are doing what Democrats do so well, turning the next nominee into the Last Best Hope for Weimarkind.  They do have Old Joe's disastrous record to run on, though, that is, if Republicans and Libertarians can keep their focus.

Recall the scuttlebutt, back when Dementia Joe renounced the nomination, that either he suffered a medical emergency and the party poobahs decided the actuarial tables were against him serving out another term, or the internal polling was so disastrous that his continuing on the ticket would have wiped out Democrats from the Senate to the school board to the dog-catcher.  But if he would not renounce graciously, there had to be a more persuasive way to get the renunciation.  "In game theory, the advice to expect the Red Baron is one way to motivate the concept of subgame perfection (each player picks the best available response at each decision node, whether that node is on the equilibrium path of play or not.)"

That more persuasive way might have involved invoking the 25th Amendment on presidential incapacitation.  The most direct method requires the vice president and a majority of the departmental secretaries to request its application.  How, then, might the party poobahs get the vice president on board with that threat, particularly if she's maintaining that her boss is fit to govern?  Can't the vice president hold up that strategy by going along with it only with a guarantee of the nomination?  If the party poobahs have any understanding of the path of play, they will offer the nomination to the vice president in order to have the vice president on board with the invocation of the 25th Amendment.  Then, the threat to remove the president the hard way is credible, and the president's renunciation of the nomination while finishing his term is a preferable outcome to being tossed.

The correlation of forces, however, might not be favorable to the continuation of a Democrat presidency, irrespective of who is running and whether or not the vice president is an empty pantsuit.