Klein: Well, let me try to live in this world for a minute, try to imagine how it would feel and what would happen. Let’s think August, maybe July, right? There are a couple of months here.
Here’s what I see happening. There is a mad dash. I mean, Joe Biden gives a sort of heroic, honorable speech: I’ve decided that it’s the right thing for me is to be a bridge to the next generation, that we all need to know when our time is up, that I have important work that I still need to focus on and trying to defend Ukraine and Israel, Palestine and all these different things. And so there’s this sort of applause to Joe Biden.
And then all of a sudden, there is this mad dash. You have, of course, Vice President Harris, but it’s very easy to name eight or 10 other people who would be, you know, very plausible here — Buttigieg, Raimondo, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Jared Polis, Raphael Warnock. Anybody can have their list. Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar.
CNN and MSNBC are going to start running candidate forums on the daily, as many of these that can actually be done. Because, one, they can actually shift the world — if the right 5,000 people watch this, you might just win the convention and the nomination and become the next president. They’re going to be giving speeches. They’re going to be sitting for a million interviews and podcasts — very busy time on “The Ezra Klein Show.”
So there’s going to be a month or two-month period here where they’re doing the thing that you talked about with the beauty contest primaries earlier. They are trying in every form they can think of to show that they have that it factor, that they are electric, that they will win, that they know how to hold the tensions of this moment and inspire but also maybe convince voters who would be wavering from the Democrats.