Josh Marshall notes that even though the Democrats are now hugely enthused about the election, the naysayers who wanted Biden to drop out are still unhappy:
[A]lready we’re hearing that this rush of support for Harris is yet another bad thing. Democrats have only just changed the last terrible thing pundits said they were doing only to be told that their solution is also a disaster in the making or at least a mistake. I don’t want to pick on anyone but this piece by Graeme Wood seems to capture this whole new storyline. In a way the argument is just a continuation of the Thunderdome craze of the last six months: a contested convention, blitz primaries, and the like. The new terrible mistake is rallying around Kamala Harris too quickly. Because this just compounds what Wood and seemingly many other pundits and columnists feel is the belief that “Democratic politics felt like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning.”
I wish I understood this reflex to stomp all over Democratic hopes from pundits who claim to be liberals. And why they want this Mad Max run to the convention I will never understand. It just makes no sense to me that they are determined to turn the process into a circus when Orange Hitler is on the ballot. Luckily it looks like Harris will have enough delegates pledged to her before the early virtual vote on August 7th so this will soon be put to rest.
As Marshall says:
The point is that it’s what Democrats really seem to want – even those who were bitterly opposed to seeing Biden pushed off the ticket and most who might have had questions about Harris as a candidate. What a political community actually seems to want, expressed through the mechanisms of the political process, somehow isn’t quite good enough for these commentators. They are demanding that they slow down, compel a few rising star governors to declare their candidacies and duke it out for a month. They’re in love with forms and visual contests and look on actual politics when it presents itself with something that looks a lot like contempt.
[…]
[B]eneath this seeming appetite to let politics run its course in all its ferality is something quite different: It’s a kind of disdain for actual voters and how actual politics works – not always pretty, mixed with peoples overweening ambitions, their intense loves and fears, and all the rest. If Democrats want to get behind Kamala Harris, stop fighting with each other, stop watching the unmerited pain of an aging leader most of them respect and even love, and get on to running a campaign against a menacing adversary … well, that’s just fine. They don’t have anything to prove to folks who write for a living.