Is Dean the Gene of 2024?

Welcome to Monday. I spent yesterday doing something I enjoy (splitting and stacking firewood) while doing something unpleasant (listening to the Packers-Vikings game).

Speaking of Minnesota, in 1968 a little known pol from that state toppled a sitting president because of his showing in the New Hampshire primary. Could it happen again next year?

Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) has announced that he’ll challenge Pres. Joe Biden in the primaries, starting with New Hampshire. Biden tried to swap out New Hampshire for South Carolina as the first primary, but the Granite State refused to move. So it’s still the first, though Biden says he won’t compete there. (In New Hampshire the party primary dates are set at the sole discretion of the Secretary of State, currently a Republican, who has no interest in accommodating Biden. The primary will almost certainly take place on January 23rd.)

Biden might not be on the ballot, but there’s a movement to run a write-in campaign for him. That’s exactly what Lyndon Johnson did in 1968. That year another little known politician from Minnesota, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, toppled Johnson, not by winning, but by exceeding expectations. McCarthy, who was on the ballot, got 42% to Johnson’s 48%. Johnson didn’t get any credit for winning even though he wasn’t even officially on the ballot. Nineteen days later he dropped out.

So, Phillips presents great danger to Biden. He’s a credible threat as opposed to Marianne Williamson, who is also running in the primaries but is not credible in any sense. Phillips won a suburban Twin Cities seat once held by Republicans. He has an MBA, ran a business and has been a loyal Democrat, voting with Biden 100% of the time. He’s generally regarded as a center-left, solid kind of guy.

Even before Robert Kennedy, Jr., dropped out of the primaries to run as an independent, he and Williamson combined for about 25% of support among Democrats. It’s likely that little of that support was for either one of them — it was simply a function of a substantial part of the party looking for somebody else. Now that that somebody else takes the form of a credible candidate, what might his numbers look like by January?

And, for you trivia buffs out there, Phillips is no Edmond Hou-Seye either. Hou-Seye ran a tire store/church (I am not making that up) in Sheboygan when he took on incumbent Gov. Tony Earl in the 1986 primary and wound up getting more than 20% of the vote. In some circles he’s blamed for Earl’s defeat at the hands of Tommy Thompson that November, but that’s not likely. Thompson won by six points and 100,000 votes. Hou-Seye’s showing, a couple months before the general election, should have been a wake-up call. He didn’t cause the problem that Earl faced, he reflected it.

In just the same way, Phillips shouldn’t be dismissed as either trivial or a trouble-maker. He’s a serious candidates, who, if he has a good showing, should make the party reconsider Biden.

Don’t get me wrong. I realize there’s plenty of danger in this. My own view, which I’ve made clear is subject to change, is that Biden is the best bet we have for keeping Donald Trump out of the White House. The leading potential candidates to replace him — Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom — would be worse. They’re both California politicians steeped in the politics of a deeply blue state and saddled with all of the challenging realities and perceptions about the Left Coast.

My own preference is for Kentucky Gov. Any Beshear, who leads his Republican opponent by 16 points in his bid for reelection in November — and in a state that Trump won by 26 points.

But there’s no guarantee that a party whose elite wing is dominated by the hard-left would nominate someone like Beshear, or Phillips for that matter, to replace Biden.

Still, I’m nervous about Joe. His approval ratings, at 37%, are lower than ever. He’s in a dead heat against a guy facing 93 criminal charges. And he looks and sounds frail as he’ll turn 81 in a few weeks. And yet the Democratic establishment has decided he’s the horse we’re going to ride because they think he’s our best bet to beat Trump again. Maybe. But I’m becoming less sure of that argument as time goes on.

And, of course, it’s fair to point out that Lyndon Johnson was toppled, but ultimately the Democrats lost in 1968 to none other than Richard Nixon. So, if I seem conflicted, count me among a growing number of my fellow Democrats.

Let’s see how things look on the evening of January 23rd. If Phillips comes within, say, 10 points of Biden, look for the floodgates to open for potential challengers.

And on another matter… Last week, around the time a gunman murdered 18 people in Maine, the U.S. Senate voted to loosen gun laws yet again. But this time they made it easier for mentally ill veterans to get guns. The shooter in Maine was a mentally ill veteran. As you’d expect, Sen. Tammy Baldwin voted against this madness while Sen. Ron Johnson voted for it. But why isn’t this untimely and awful Senate action getting more attention? Here’s the brief blurb I found tucked away in the back pages of yesterday’s State Journal:

Guns for mentally impaired veterans: Voting 53 for and 45 against, the Senate on Oct. 25 adopted an amendment that would restore the gun rights of individuals judged by the Department of Veterans Affairs to be so mentally impaired that they cannot manage their own veterans’ benefits. By law, the department must appoint a fiduciary to manage their benefits. The department also must report the individual’s name to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check system, which disqualifies the individual from purchasing a firearm because of his or her mental condition. This amendment would ban funding to carry out the reporting requirement. The amendment was added to a bill (H.R. 4366), later passed, that would provide appropriations for agencies including the departments of Veterans Affairs and Transportation in fiscal 2024.