I don’t believe the donors were dumb enough to be misled.

The Democrats have backed themselves into a corner. Harris and the DEI crowd will not allow somebody to take her place as the nominee. Yet even if what brains she has work, she’s unpopular, can’t work with anyone and even dumber than Biden who could at least wheel-and-deal in his younger days. Hillary’s strangulation of the Dem primary process in ’16 leaves them with no experienced national campaigners, except maybe Sanders who is (1) too old, (2) too divisive for moderates and (3) a white Jew.
Yet running with Harris means finding a VP who can work with her and bring some people she can’t. Logic dictates a moderate white guy, which the DEI crowd won’t accept, unless perhaps he was gay or trans, and then no one else will. Besides, I can’t see Kamala working with someone smarter than herself as a potential replacement (which means anyone with an IQ north of a houseplant).
This will not end pretty.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and Harris will step down… Not.

The DEI moment of a black woman President (who isn’t really black) will be too enticing.

All that’s left is the negotiation…

How much or what will the Bidens (especially Jill and Hunter) demand to go away?

How will they keep everyone out of prison?

What about Harris? Who becomes the #2 on the ticket, or does she take a deal (as Rudolph mentioned), but the First Woman President (Yes, I assumed her gender) is probably too much to give up.

A demented thought occurred to me: Kamala Harris has a history of sexual indiscretion with Willy Brown, former San Francisco Mayor, and hence her political career was launched. It would be wonderful if a woman like that had to run against womanizing Trump. One word out of her mouth about Trump’s moral standards and all he has to say is, “Willy Brown.” Fate has a sense of humor.

Mooch hasn’t held a salaried job in 16 years. For 17 years prior, she held positions whose duties were a mystery to anyone outside her workplace, and, one suspects, to all but a few in her workplace. She was suspiciously well paid for about half that time. The last position she held was eliminated in a hiring freeze when she vacated it. Her law license lapsed in 1993 and she quit practicing two years prior to that.

Pat Nixon (b. 1912) grew up on a truck farm and was continuously employed from 1927 to 1946, often attending school at the same time or working multiple jobs. It’s conceivable she was passed some cash in those years by her siblings; she got nothing from her mother and father as they both had died by the time she was 15. She was never implicated in any grift. It would never have occurred to anyone to consider her for any public office and she would never have considered any such thing.

What does it say about Democratic voters that Michelle Obama has any constituency at all?

I think the Dems, not Team Biden, have reached a point that taking a loss is a near inevitability at this point if things remain as they are, and not much better with a change. The leading Dem candidates for ’28, including Newsome, Witmer, and Hochul, have zero interest in running and losing in ’24. Each wants to keep their powder dry and shove someone else into the breach (hence Newsome is suspected to be behind the “Draft Gretch” movement). But the leading candidate to take the hit in ’24 is Kamala Harris. She’s unpopular within and without the party, so she’s expendable and the only card she has is that she’s the one left. They’ll nominate her, let her lose, blame Trump and the white males for disparaging a woman of color, and play for the Senate, the mid-terms, and a post recession ’28.

Does anyone else long for the days of the smoke filled back rooms where the real anonymous party bosses gathered to push for the selection of a candidate who could win?
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No. I prefer a tidy process which produces a deliberative convention. All delegates elected in single-member constituencies via ranked choice voting or via two rounds of caucuses – precinct caucuses among ordinary registrants choosing delegates to a district caucus which then chooses a delegate to the general convention. You do all the voting over two Saturdays in June followed by a convention in August. The convention’s job is mostly party business but also nominates the presidential candidate either via a multi-round ballot where the trailing candidates are excluded after each ballot or by a single ranked-choice ballot with multiple rounds of tabulation. The VP candidate could then be chosen thirty days later by an ex officio body formed to replace the current ‘national committees’. You could have candidate fora for about 10 weeks prior to the balloting.

Art:
The smoke-filled rooms (as the late Dick Nolan used to comment) were very good at sniffing out bad stuff in a candidate’s background that could interfere with electability. They were good filters for “clunkers” (and so would never have passed on Harris). On the other hand, they likely wouldn’t have supported someone like Trump either. I’d receive their advice, but would never commit to their consent.

The smoke-filled rooms (as the late Dick Nolan used to comment) were very good at sniffing out bad stuff in a candidate’s background that could interfere with electability.
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Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson were all serial adulterers. (The first two on a much smaller scale than the last two, to be sure). Wendell Willkie in 1940 was living with his mistress; he’d separated from his wife around about 1925. The Democratic Party in 1928 nominated a Tammany boss and the Democratic VP candidate in 1944 was personally and politically enmeshed with the Prendergast family in Kansas City.

Somehow those “marital mishaps” wind up having lots less impact than you might wish. As I recall, even in the case of Clinton, the charge Republicans levelled against Clinton wasn’t about cheating on his wife so much, rather it was about his lying about it. Everyone knew about his behavior prior to the White House. Republicans legitimately had concerns about his becoming a risk of blackmail.