Today is Sunday, July 21, 2024, the day that President Joe Biden dropped out of the race for president at around two in the afternoon. In fact, I heard the news first from my son who texted me a CNN breaking news announcement and I immediately was skeptical it was the real thing. So Elliot and I turned on the news and there it was: Joe Biden has decided to “stand down” from seeking the presidency a second time. In his letter that he posted to social media platforms, the president ended his reelection bid and quickly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him today. He also said he would address the nation later this week on his unprecedented decision not to seek a second term.

In a CNN article about how Biden reached his decision to withdraw from the race written by Jeremy Herb, MJ Lee, Jeff Zeleny, Phil Mattingly, Arlette Saenz, and Priscilla Alvarez entitled “Inside Biden’s unprecedented exit from the presidential race,” the details of how the president reached his monumental decision are revealed.

In the end, Biden exited the political stage in isolation since he was isolating at his beach house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, as he was recovering from the effects of a mild case of COVID-19. So his decision to drop out was detailed in a letter posted to social media instead of taking to the airwaves and making a formal announcement.

“It was a low-key way to reveal one of the most historic decisions in modern American politics, but time was not on Biden’s side to reach a decision or make an announcement.” Never before has a president left a reelection race this close to Election Day – and for 24 days, it seemed he was stubbornly planning to ride out the storm that followed the June 27 CNN debate in Atlanta.

He spent the three weeks after the debate repeating that he was staying in the race against former insurrectionist-in-chief Donald Dump. The president dug in. He insisted he could still beat Drumpf. His inner circle shrank to his closest aides and family. He was forced to retreat to Delaware, where he reached a decision in the last day and a half, finally conceding that a man loyal to the Democratic Party for more than a half-century was seen as a drag on the ticket.

But in the end, the pressure on Biden from party leaders, rank-and-file lawmakers and donors – and the polling showing the perilous and potentially insurmountable path Biden faced amid a growing deficit with Drumpf – ultimately proved too much. The blunt reality became a chorus of voices calling for the president to exit the race.

The president’s team initially counted on the June 27th debate to shake up a race that Biden was trailing in and the debate certainly did shake up things, but not in the way the team had intended.

Instead, Biden’s campaign unraveled over the course of the next 24 days. Everything the president and his team tried to do to calm Democrats’ fears simply failed to shed the perception that Biden’s age was too advanced, and his health was too fragile, for him to stay in the race. Attention was diverted from discussing about Drumpf’s innumerable shortcomings to Biden’s apparent decline in mental acuity.

With those two posts on X Sunday afternoon, Biden withdrew from the race and threw his support behind his vice president, Kamala Harris, in the hopes of quickly coalescing their party and moving past the chaos that had engulfed Democrats since the debate.

Will this gamble work, though? It’s too early to say, but I think this new choice of candidate just dropped on our laps will galvanize Democratic voters, especially the millions of women who see Harris as a voice in their struggle to maintain reproductive integrity. And the new scuttlebutt about how to portray Harris’s endorsement for president is the prosecutor versus the felon! Don’t you just love it?

We are in for a bumpy ride until November, folks, but I can’t wait to see Harris square off with the convicted felon in September if the Orange Turd doesn’t drop out of the debate for reasons of sheer fear.

So, remember, folks, where were you when you heard the stunning news of Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race? I know I was home with Elliot waiting to go out with our friend “Patricia” to Parkside Restaurant, in Corona, later in the day.

In the end, we should show our gratefulness to the president for his heroic decision to put his country over his ego, a sharp contrast to the subhuman known as Donald Fuck who is only running to escape accountability for his many transgressions. I just hope that Harris as the nominee will not bolster skepticism in voters over her gender, which happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the fact that she is a woman of color. This would just reflect on our juvenile collective conscience as we decide between democracy and autocracy in this consequential election. There is no contest, in my mind. At least now, we have a fighting chance in Harris to defeat Drumpf.

Also, if Harris is the uncontested nominee, she must select a strong, centrist candidate to be her running mate and there are quite a good number of Democrats out there who can fill those shoes. So let’s get rolling!

Have a good week.

Stay safe and be well.

That’s Atticus trying to escape from the bathroom window on the fourth floor.

Here he is, again, trying to escape.