Jim Clyburn

As President Biden plans to launch his reelection campaign, he is whistling past a graveyard of recently discarded Democratic Party icons, who have either left the scene willingly or are being gracelessly kicked out. Nancy Pelosi. Steny Hoyer. Pat Leahy. Jim Clyburn. Anthony Fauci. Dianne Feinstein. Their combined age is 500 — and until a few months ago, they were running the country. Now they’re shadows of their former selves, headed to the greener pastures of retirement, book deals or the backbenches of the House of Representatives. Over the past few months, the Democratic Party’s leadership has transitioned from the Silent Generation to a mixture of baby boomers and Gen Xers.

American politics is getting senile. Donald Trump and Barack Obama were both elected as agents of change, repudiations of an ancien régime represented by the Bush and Clinton dynasties. But after eight years of Obama, Hillary Clinton inherited the Democratic party anyway. Frustrated with just how little had changed, voters clutched for a more radical alternative in 2016 — and they found it in Trump. Now, if polls and betting markets are to be believed, the country is on the verge of turning its back on Trump. But if he does lose in November, his defeat does not promise to be a source of renewal — not when the alternative is a 77-year-old former vice president.

Joe Biden owes his nomination to black Democrats, who never joined the revolution led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, closed ranks around the former vice president, and overpowered the rest of the Democratic coalition to rescue his candidacy. But Biden is struggling with black men and younger black voters and Democrats know the votes of black Americans will become more difficult with each future election. Many black Americans feel taken for granted by the party and have become increasingly disillusioned with politics and politicians in general.

House Democrats, flummoxed by their failed attempt to remove President Trump earlier this year, are gearing up for another round of quasi-impeachment with their coronavirus oversight committee. It's been just a few months, believe it or not, since the House impeached the President for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, but the moment was quickly overshadowed by the global pandemic. The coronavirus committee thus could be the Democrats' last ditch effort to dig up dirt on the President before the election in November.

At the time of writing, Joe Biden is on course for an approximately 30 point victory in South Carolina. Not that he won with 30 percent of the vote; rather, he is beating his nearest competitor (Bernie Sanders) by approximately 30 percentage points. That's a truly romping win — but ironically, given his many many decades on the political scene, the American elite media has never known quite how to cover the Biden candidacy. First, if you are a consumer of online political news and commentary, you might have noticed the conspicuous lack of virtually any vocal Biden supporters on social media.

We should be bored by now — perhaps we are. Certainly, the anger against Donald Trump’s tweets isn’t quite as vociferous as before. We are used to @realdonaldtrump now. Three years in, who cares if he sounds presidential? But the media outrage machine still limbers up, on demand, at every provocation. Today’s doozy: Trump compared the Democratic attempts to impeach him over Ukraine to a ‘lynching’. Sure enough, the media explainers did their job. Lynching, we are told by every wired copy monkey who has to file 600 words to their line editor, is a ‘racially charged/loaded term’ that refers to — here I quote the BBC — ‘historic extrajudicial executions by white mobs mainly against African Americans.