RICH LOWRY: Beware Gretchen Whitmer

In 1960, the New York Yankees fired their legendary manager Casey Stengel for being too old. “I’ll never make the mistake of being 70 again,” Stengel quipped. If Democrats dump Joe Biden, the president might want to say the same thing about being 81.

The biggest loser of the debate, besides the president himself, was first lady Jill Biden. One assumes that she was the one with the most influence on her husband’s foolhardy decision to run for a second term and could have persuaded him to stand down last year and give Democrats time to have a normal nomination process. Instead, she went along with the hubristic delusion that an already unsteady 80-something could serve in the most demanding job on the planet until … January 2029.

Now, the bodyguard of lies of Democrats and much of the left-of-center media that had protected Joe Biden from questions about his fitness for office has finally fallen away. Still, there’s no mechanism to force him out of the race unless he and Jill make the decision themselves. If Biden does exit, suddenly Donald Trump isn’t running against an octogenarian considered too old for a second term by a supermajority of Americans before his debate debacle.

The natural heir is the vice president. Kamala Harris has many weaknesses, but, at a youthful 59 years old, frailty is not one of them. As a historic nominee and a progressive Democrat, she would be the beneficiary of deliriously favorable coverage in glossy magazines and much of the elite media, at least initially.

On the other side of the ledger, she’s as unpopular as Biden and would be saddled with the administration’s record. She’s a terrible boss and is utterly charmless. Biden has held up pretty well in the Rust Belt states, when Harris would probably give up ground there. An upside of Biden’s age is that he seems too old to be a radical. Harris, though, is a progressive from central casting, combining the politics of Elizabeth Warren with the charisma of Al Gore.

Even with the age issue neutralized, Trump would be favored over her, so it’s not clear how much Democrats would gain by making a painful switcheroo.

If Biden goes, it will be an admission that he was a failure and that Democrats have been lying about his condition for years — not an auspicious basis for launching a new candidate, who, by the way, won’t have won any votes in a primary or caucus. Getting to a stronger potential candidate requires bypassing Harris, which involves its own complications. Is an identity-politics-obsessed party really going to pass over the first African American female vice president of the United States? Even if it can, an alternative presumably wouldn’t be the unanimous choice of a Democratic convention, creating chaos at an event choreographed to drive the message of a presumptive nominee.

If Democrats can somehow work through all of this, someone such as Gretchen Whitmer would be a much tougher opponent for Trump on paper. She’s a young, relatively popular governor in the key swing state of Michigan. She wouldn’t have to answer directly for any of Biden’s failures and has a history of presenting herself in campaigns as a non-ideological Democrat. “Fix the damn roads” was her slogan when she first ran for governor.

Any somewhat conventional Democrat would have better odds against Trump than Biden. It would be easier for such a candidate to make the race all about Trump, something Biden wanted to do, but is going to be impossible after his catastrophic debate. The likelihood, though, is that Democrats won’t find a way to push aside Biden.

At the end of the day, by going along with the deceptions about his mental and physical state and hoping that the public somehow wouldn’t notice, Democrats chose to hire Joe Biden at age 81. They presumably won’t make that mistake again, but it may well be too late for 2024.

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.