https://www.vox.com/politics/357955/biden-age-democrats-nominee-kamala-harris

Thanks, Obama.

Barack Obama didn’t choose Joe Biden because he thought that the then-Delaware senator would make a great Democratic nominee in 2016. To the contrary, by most accounts, Obama thought that Biden would be a totally nonviable candidate by the time his own hypothetical presidency ended. And he reportedly selected Biden precisely for that reason.

According to senior Democrats who spoke with New York magazine’s Gabriel Debenedetti in 2019, Obama had assumed that Biden would be too old to run for president by 2016. And he reasoned that this fact would render Biden an especially loyal second-in-command: Bereft of political aspirations of his own, Biden would have no compunction about putting Obama’s interests and goals above all else.

embarrassing!

Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris in 2020 was even more misguided. When he made that choice in August 2020, there was little basis for believing that Harris was one of the most politically formidable Democrats in the country.

Harris had just mounted an exceptionally lackluster bid for the presidency.

.. Nor was Harris’s electoral track record before 2020 especially encouraging. She had never won an election in a swing state or competitive district. And in her first statewide race in deep blue California in 2010, Harris defeated her Republican rival by less than 1 percentage point. Two years earlier, Barack Obama had won that state by more than 23 points.

Given that Biden was 77 in August 2020, the likelihood that his running-mate would one day become his party’s standard-bearer was unusually high. It was entirely plausible that health problems would force him to retire before the end of his first term, let alone his second. And were Harris to become an incumbent president, no other Democrat would stand a chance of defeating her in a contested primary. For these reasons, Biden’s primary consideration in choosing a running-mate should have been his or her electability.

Instead, he put enormous weight on demographic considerations. “I think he came to the conclusion that he should pick a Black woman,” former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the New York Times in the summer of 2020. “They are our most loyal voters and I think that the Black women of America deserved a Black vice-presidential candidate.”

Without question, it is desirable for a vice presidential candidate to energize the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies. That is one dimension of electability. But it is not obvious that Harris actually possessed that capability; after all, her 2020 campaign resonated so little with Black voters in South Carolina that she was forced to withdraw before that state’s primary.

Over the past two years, Harris’s poor poll numbers — and Democratic insiders’ lack of confidence in her political acumen — reduced pressure on Biden to step down, and allow his party to run a less aged and unpopular nominee. Many party leaders seemed to reason that Biden was a safer bet than his vice president.

Vox places the blame on Wokeness.