I watched the Kamala Harris interview on CNN. I tried to stay hopeful. No, really, I did. That hope lasted until she fumbled the first question in a blizzard of verbal nothingness. The interviewer then tried to help her by essentially giving her the right answers, and Harris merely repeated the new question back at the questioner without raising her voice at the end of the sentence. For the next 15 minutes, the pattern continued. The interview confirmed what the political world has known all along. Kamala Harris may be the least talented politician who has ever risen so far in elected office. She talks in word salads, hold the chicken. She fills the allotted time, and you walk away starved.

We are about to get the race for president nobody wants. Trump is running and could win. His following is a cult. Rock solid. (See Tim Alberta’s amazing book.) But why is Biden running again? Some say that now he has the job he wanted so badly, he just can’t let it go. Others say he is the only one who can beat Trump. That’s what he thinks. The decision to run reeks of hubris. He told us he was transitional. He lied. But watching Harris, I think we may be missing the real reason he is running for reelection. He is a wise, old politician. He knows political talent when he sees it. When he is standing at a podium and looks back to his right at Harris, part of him thinks, “Well, I sure fucked that one up.” Biden has a Harris problem, which means we have a Harris problem too.

Think back. Why Harris? In 2020, the Biden campaign was running fumes. Harris had quickly destroyed her own presidential campaign as soon as people got a large dose of her talking. The next state in the primary was South Carolina. It was make or break. In stepped Representative Jim Clyburn. In South Carolina, especially with the enormous number of black voters, Clyburn was the kingmaker. So, Biden cut a deal with Clyburn. He promised to make a black woman his running mate. It was a good political deal. A good thing for the country. Clyburn saved Biden, and that was that.

Harris was on the short list. Biden needed a tiebreaker. I am an old dude. We can be quite sentimental. Stay on the planet long enough and the threads of your own history guide your decisions. Biden was still grieving his, heir apparent, oldest son Beau. When Beau was the attorney general of Delaware, he had worked with, and liked, the AG for California, Harris. And that was it. Biden valued the opinion of his dead son over his cold-eyed political assessment of the woman who ran her own campaign into the ground. Grief is how we got Harris.

When it was clear that Trump was running again, Biden had a fresh problem. He had a VP with lower approval polls than his abysmal ratings. He knows, we know, that Harris cannot beat Trump. Like it or not, America won’t vote for a woman for president. If he kept his word and was transitional, he was honor bound to support a Harris bid. He had to back a loser. The Democratic primary would be nasty. Biden out of the way, I can think of 5 Democratic governors with the talent and ambition to run. Every president has an enormous ego. It’s in the job description. Biden boxed himself in. His legacy couldn’t be backing a loser. He had to run. Against all sanity, an 81-year-old man with declining capabilities blocked way of talented Democrats because he had given himself no choice.

A couple of weeks ago, driving home from a movie, my wife and I had a discussion, maybe an argument. It was one of the most bizarre moments we have shared. I asked, “Would it be better for America if Biden had a stroke or fell and broke his hip tomorrow?” I advocated for a stroke because that meant Harris would be president and the party would have an immediate need to begin a primary. The hip break would leave Biden functional with the hope he could recover in time. How insane is that? Still, I wake up every day and for a few seconds before I pick up my phone, I have hope that Trump or Biden died during the night setting off a scramble to find the next generation of candidates. With either of them gone, any 60-year-old, from either party would walk away with the election.

I have never been so gloomy about America’s prospects. Trump can win this. Need a primer on what that means: The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025. Biden is fading fast. Look at his stiff-legged walk. Listen to his mumbling. Realize his staff is hiding him. He has not done a press conference since July! He can barely do one scripted event a week. We need a candidate who can do 3 a day. He simply can’t do it anymore. Of course, Trump is fading too, but like it or not, this is now a classic change election and Trump is the change. The reason that the improving economy doesn’t stick to Biden is that people are using their feelings about the economy as a proxy for ‘Biden is too damn old.’ His age overwhelms all his messages. Watch him and listen to him enough and you just say no.

Forever, I create political ads I my head for fun. Got to do them for real for a moment, too. Here is the commercial you will see. It is aimed at the swing voters in the 6 states that will decide the election. 30 seconds. The first 15 seconds are clips of Biden verbal mistakes, then of him lost on stages. There is an abundance of those available. The second half is the classic black and white video of Harris word salad. The clips where she confuses even herself are perfect. Then the screen fills with her face, still in black and white. Rising from the background is her laugh. You know the one. It is incredibly annoying. The narrator comes in to read the tag line. “WE JUST CAN’T TAKE THE CHANCE. Paid for by Trump for President.” Trump’s face in color now on the screen. And, across American, independent voters are nodding in agreement.