OPINION:
Democrats are so scared of their own fractured base that portions of the Democratic National Convention will go online in August. With pro-Hamas demonstrations raging across universities from coast to coast, the last thing President Biden’s handlers want is a national showcase of the chaos he has unleashed.
It’s 1968 all over again. Hubert Humphrey’s chance at winning the White House was dashed when 10,000 Vietnam War protesters swarmed the International Amphitheatre in Chicago and clashed with police, who responded with clubs and tear gas outside the Democratic confab.
With the 2024 convention scheduled to return to the Windy City, the optics couldn’t be worse. Mayor Brandon Johnson is a big fan of the Marxist groups organizing the tent cities on college campuses. In January, for example, he moved a “Uniting for Peace” resolution through the City Council demanding that Israel accept a cease-fire.
Now he appears to have changed his tune and has dispatched SWAT teams in overwhelming numbers to shut down encampments. At the beginning of the month, his police arrested 68 demonstrators at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Convention organizers are doing everything in their power to pressure the mayor to deny demonstration permits — whatever it takes to keep the “Genocide Joe” signs far away from the venue. That’s assuming a full, in-person event takes place.
On top of the possibility of riots, the DNC has to deal with the ever-present peril in a live event of Mr. Biden becoming lost on the way to the podium, or reading stage directions on the teleprompter out loud. Going online for at least some of the proceedings makes a lot of sense in terms of mitigating risks. The party is desperate.
There’s no way Mr. Biden can win over a closely divided electorate when his base isn’t unified. A New York Times/Siena College poll released Monday found 9% of battleground state voters who supported Mr. Biden in 2020 are jumping ship in 2024 over the Middle East debacle, saying there’s “not really any chance” they’d support his return to the White House.
The most disgruntled of these Democrats might settle for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but 11% of battleground state residents who voted for Mr. Biden last time admitted that Donald Trump would have done a much better job handling the Israel-Gaza situation.
No wonder the DNC’s executive team is losing sleep at night.
Meanwhile, Mr. Biden’s main opponent drew an excited crowd of 100,000 in deep-blue New Jersey on Saturday. This was one of the few days Biden-donor Judge Juan Merchan made available for Mr. Trump to hit the campaign trail. Noting this, the former president slammed the current president, saying “the whole world is laughing at him.” The gloves are off.
“I never used to talk about Biden this way until he did something that you can’t do,” Mr. Trump said. “He indicted a very popular president … on made up charges and nonsense. The local DAs are run out of Washington. They’ll do anything to win.”
Retreating to an online convention would only confirm Mr. Biden’s weakness. His handlers are trying too hard, and it’s backfiring.
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