Alan Zendell, July 21, 2024

One day, when my mother was 88, she drove down a gentle hill that terminated at a stop sign. I don’t know whether she saw the sign, but she hit the rear end of an eighteen-wheeler that was passing through the intersection. She claimed the truck had hit her car, which was absurd. The incident was witnessed by an ophthalmologist who told me, afterward, that my mother had a perception problem that he could diagnose just by watching her drive. Her insurance agent put it more graphically: “Every time we see her car coming, we duck.”

I had no choice. I knew it would hurt her, because at her age retaining her independence was more important than anything. As the oldest of her offspring, I had to take her car away from her and help my sister get her into assisted living. She fought and protested until the very end, but by that point it was obvious to everyone who knew her that her time had come. For the remainder of her life, every time she saw me, the first thing she said was, “You ruined my life.” That always hurt, but I knew I’d done the right thing – for all of us.

My sister and I had accepted the inevitable. Putting it off would have endangered my mother and everyone in her path, and accomplished nothing except deferring a very unpleasant task until it was too late. As a nation, we face a different inevitability that might have catastrophic consequences. President Biden is at the wheel of the ship of state. As president of the United States, he holds what is still the most powerful and influential office in the entire world.

No one knows if Biden is up to serving as president for four more years, but it’s become clear that he may not be up to the job of both running the country and campaigning for fifteen weeks. My feelings are similar to when I had to deal with my mother. She’d lived a long, often hard life, and she had earned the right to end it with pride and dignity. Because she couldn’t accept her situation, I wound up taking those from her.

I hate the idea that America seems to be doing that to a president who sincerely loves this country and who has saved us, at least for now, from disaster. But there’s far more at stake than there was in my mother’s case. I love Joe Biden, but the future of our country is more important than his feelings. America has three priorities between now and Election Day: preventing the Middle East from exploding, keeping Ukraine in the fight against Russian aggression, and by far most important, guaranteeing that Donald Trump never sets foot in the White House again.

Looking at the next election as the defining moment for the survival of our democracy and our Constitution is not an exaggeration. The only way to assure that Trump doesn’t win is to attack him with the same ruthless energy he uses against every opponent. Whether it was his advisors or Biden himself who set their previous course, he has not done that. He wasn’t prepared for Trump’s onslaught during the so-called debate, and I’m not sure he was equipped to fight back even if he had been. It is that uncertainty that has caused young people and many of his peers to lose confidence in him, and there’s far too much at stake to risk losing.

To win, Democrats must wage a campaign as cold and hard as Trump’s. They needn’t reiterate Biden’s record – his supporters know it already, and rehashing the past won’t overcome the doubts of voters who have lost confidence in him. Democrats must bash Trump with his own words and deeds, repeatedly hammering home who this sociopath is and what his values are. Biden might not be able to do that effectively for more than three months – but Kamala Harris can.

Vice President Harris would be a controversial, risky candidate. The recent history of American politics says she’d start with two strikes against her – she’s a woman and she’s not white. But Harris has shown herself to be very much up to the task leading the charge for women’s rights in the wake of damaging decisions by a revisionist Supreme Court, and she’s young and energetic enough to appeal generations X and Y. I had my doubts, but a new vision has crystalized in my mind.

Picture Kamala Harris, the hard-nosed prosecutor and Attorney General at the campaign microphone. Imagine a dark-skinned woman going nose-to-nose with a blustering old white bully who sounds like a raving lunatic when he’s not in front of a teleprompter. She’ll eat him alive, and in doing so she’ll win the hearts and minds of millions of voters who have been telling us for months that they hate both of their November choices.

Team her up with someone like Andy Beshear, who is serving his second term as Governor of bright red Kentucky, and the Democrats will have a team that can address all of America, and most important, defeat Donald Trump.