The billionaire founder of the world’s largest hedge fund outlined how he sees the Democratic Party having three ways to move forward with either keeping or replacing President Biden as the party’s presidential nominee.
Ray Dalio, founder and co-chief investment officer of Bridgewater Associates, wrote in Time magazine that he respects, likes and empathizes with the president. However, he explained that party leadership “suffered a terrible loss of confidence in its honesty and judgment” because it “hid President Biden’s weak and rapidly declining condition” and “told the American people that we shouldn’t worry about it.”
Biden has repeatedly insisted that he is “all in” on remaining the party’s presidential nominee amid the controversy, and Democratic leaders have left the door open to him continuing as the nominee even as a growing number of rank-and-file elected officials call for him to step aside.
Dalio wrote that he sees three options for Democrats to move forward — keeping Biden as the nominee under what he called the “bait and switch plan,” or replacing him using the “mini-primary plan” or the “coronation plan” he outlined in the Time op-ed.
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Here is a look at the options Dalio sees for how Democrats can proceed.
Bait and Switch
Dalio explained that the Democratic Party’s “plan before the public’s discovery of President Biden’s condition, which is still the plan that they are now publicly sticking with, is to assert that President Biden will be fine.”
For example, he said that for Democrats to now suggest Biden “is good between 10am and 4pm” without addressing the “likelihood that he will get worse with time” is “obviously ridiculous and an insult to people’s intelligence.”
That dynamic leads to a “loss of trust in the Democrats’ straightforwardness and judgment” and an unclear picture of the party’s direction, Dalio wrote.
He explained that the “real thinking” behind the bait and switch plan is that Democrats “believe running Biden and Harris gives them their best shot of getting elected and that they will deal with his condition after they win a second term because the alternatives look worse to them.”
Dalio called this a “terrible plan, any way you cut it.”
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Coronation
Under this option, President Biden would pass the nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris, which Dalio refers to as a coronation because “he and others, but not the people, bestow the crown on her.”
This course of action “would be less messy but would leave people without the opportunity to hear the debates” and choose a nominee after hearing competing visions of the party’s way forward, he wrote.
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Mini-Primary
Dalio’s preferred option is a “mini-primary” that would feature debates between a group of contenders “after President Biden steps aside and the division between those of the moderate left and those of the hard left will surface.”
He acknowledged that it would “probably be harmful for their chances of winning in the general elections but would allow the American people to see and choose the leader and path they would like to be on.”
“I personally think the best way to get there is via the Mini-Primary Plan so that voters can see debates and the candidates’ positions and, with those stress-tested, can vote for whom they want,” he wrote.
Whichever course of action Democratic leaders choose, Dalio said that they “must acknowledge the problem — that Biden might not be able to serve out his term — and explain how they will deal with that in a detailed way, most importantly by making clear who will lead (e.g. Harris).”
Dalio wrote that party leaders must also outline “what Democrats will stand for by having a very detailed platform and signaling who or which type of people she will choose as advisors, cabinet officials, etc.”
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