The praise Democrats are heaping upon Joe Biden for accepting he is not the man to stand against Donald Trump should be taken with a grain of salt.
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The Obamas, the Clintons, and other senior Democrats pulling the strings behind the curtain have all known of the President's cognitive decline for many months, if not years.
The President Biden who could not recall Scott Morrison's name when the AUKUS alliance was announced in September 2021 was not the man Americans voted for the previous November.
Nor is he the man who, against the backdrop of a US Capitol in lockdown after the January 6 riots, vowed to govern for all Americans at his inauguration.
The tragedy is that President Biden has refused to accept this. Those closest to him - his wife Jill and son Hunter - did not want his tenure as the leader of the free world to come to an end after just four short years either. That hubris has come at a high price.
The Clintons and the Obamas are well aware the last month has been a disaster for the Democrats. The situation could have been very different if Mr Biden had announced this time last year he would not be running again. After all, pundits from all sides of the political spectrum were saying he would be a one-term president in 2020.
Time and tide wait for no man. As his term in office draws to a close the President is now 81. If he were to serve a second term he would be 85 at the end of it.
![US President Joe Biden. Picture Shutterstock US President Joe Biden. Picture Shutterstock](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/3BUUzmFAhrhLyX9rFCubPq5/e0b6329b-af17-4be2-8dc0-6472a7d4a1af.jpg/r0_242_3500_2209_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
After Mr Biden's dismal showing in the debate against Mr Trump, the writing was on the wall. Unlike his tightly choreographed public appearances, the format left him nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. After months of dissimulation by his minders, with what appears to have been the active co-operation of parts of the US media, the horrible truth was out. His polling numbers, never good, went through the floor.
So what happens now? The Democrats have just over 100 days to convince American voters they should rally around a different candidate.
While Kamala Harris is the obvious, and at this late stage, probably the only serious option, she is unlikely to be able to snatch victory from the jaws of almost certain defeat. Trump has received a massive boost from the assassination attempt, the canny selection of JD Vance - a face of generational change - as his running mate, and the heroes' welcome that they both received at last week's Republican National Convention.
With other possible Democrat candidates already going to ground on the basis they would rather be Vice-President Harris's running mate than her competition, she is almost certain to be the last person standing when the Democrat National Convention kicks off on August 19 - if not before.
She is the only contender able to go on the front foot right now. Nobody else has the money, the party machine or even staff to make any sort of splash immediately.
While Mr Trump would obviously have preferred to run against Mr Biden, he and his team have obviously war gamed the possibility of a Kamala Harris candidacy. The Vice-President has never really cut through with voters and is highly vulnerable on the issue of mass illegal immigration across the Mexican border.
While the Democrats will pull out all the stops to sell her as a viable presidential candidate, others will see her as, like Kevin Rudd in 2013, a night watchman brought in to save the silverware.
Under Mr Biden the Democrats were heading for a massacre that could see the Republicans take the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate.
If Vice-President Harris can stop that from happening she will be remembered as a saviour of her party.
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