All but Biden see he is weighted out of the race

There can be excuses and explanations and calls upon God or other higher powers to witness that one candidate or another is evil incarnate. But observers must contemplate what has always seemed obvious: that, as things stand, Trump is the old man most likely to win the election in early November.

And, most likely, the person he beats will be Biden both because the President would rather lose the presidency than the Democrat nomination, and because he has a strong self-belief, contrary to the evidence, that he can win. Particularly if his colleagues stop undermining him.

Biden might have his good points, particularly by comparison with Trump. But he has not demonstrated any new zest for the campaign ahead, one able to take away the impression of a tired, sick, wooden old man looking confused and losing his place on the autocue. He has negative impressions to counteract, even before he is on equal terms against another old man given to ranting, repetition and bare faced lying. It's not merely a matter of appearance of fitness, and match fitness, but also of spring in his step and enthusiasm for the task of governing the nation.

But the crisis of impression management goes well beyond this. Despite all of his legal problems and distractions, and all of his time in court, Trump has been setting both the narrative and the argument. He appears to have persuaded not only his supporters but a substantial number of Biden supporters that the past three and a half years have been ones of unalloyed economic woe. That these lean years under Biden should be compared with the boom times in the Trump years, and the careful and restrained stewardship of public resources that he provided.

Now that is all tosh; indeed, most of the economic statistics would suggest that Biden has presided over economic growth, improved employment and fresh investment in the economy, by comparison with the stagnation of the Trump years. Trump, allegedly, is counting on voters forgetting the hard economic times of his presidency and hoping that voters will instead "remember" the images, impressions and misleading propaganda he is putting out. Polls are suggesting that his new narrative is winning out, which is to say that voters' memories are shorter than one would think. They can be changed with the right types of advertising, spin, and outright lies.

That may be lamentable, of course, but Biden would not be the first politician confronting a mendacious rival manufacturing false facts and impressions. Nor is it by any means the first presidential campaign in which unimaginable sums of money are being spent on constructing alternative realities. Nor is it the first campaign in which a candidate has personalised and nationalised a sense of grievance, an emotional edge in which one side is, in effect, accused of taking something away from the other and of disrespecting them. Trump has made his own problems (such as his legal problems over allegations of sexual assaults, paying off porn stars with whom he had conducted affairs and diddling the books) seem like assaults on the integrity of every decent American. No "facts," no "realities" and no "feelings" coming from the ordinary political town square can overcome the alleged Biden or Democrat affront, indignity or insult.

But it is one thing to remark, ruefully, that one side seems to have the better of the argument at the moment. You wouldn't think that the Biden camp was also spending similar unimaginable sums of money in its own efforts to define the argument and the stakes. Biden and the Democrats also have all the benefits of incumbency. All, apparently, to very little effect. One side seems to be cutting through; the other appears to be foundering.

One could say that this is because one side has a dog as a candidate, that the dog won't hunt, and that the turd cannot be polished. Well, yes, but one might have said that about Donald Trump, even in a beauty contest of one. His record of leadership and of administration and management is bad, whether in private business or in (it sometimes seemed much the same thing) government. His personal conduct, and his ethical standards, invited the most basic questions about his fitness for office and his character.

Perhaps he has had various bully pulpits from which he could repulse many of the questioners, but one cannot spend years in public office without eventually being forced to answer. Even more amazingly, the Christian right lobby and the American Supreme Court, which seem to be much the same thing, provides him with cover when troubling questions arise about his personal and moral conduct. I have heard some interesting theories about this. Perhaps some Democrats are battle weary from reprehensible debates and careful about dealing with this head-on. Be that as it may, the very perversity of the relationships between the three sets of hypocrites leaves vulnerabilities which could be politically exploited, but which are not. Or, if anyone is trying - one might think the choice lobby would have a big go - they are not getting value for money from their advertising dollars. These are people who say they want to highlight an issue and have people vote upon it, not issue managers trying to downplay it during the campaign.

It seems clear that the final days of the election will involve an all-out assault on potential voters, particularly on the working class, pointing out what they could stand to lose if Trump carries out promises about cutting out health benefits, subsidies for education and public health spending, social security and veterans' entitlements. Warning too that Trump has said he intends to abolish a host of environmental and anti-pollution measures, whether in relation to river health, clear water, or oil spills. That's on top of extreme and extremist actions against immigration through Mexico, and the pandering to white protestants that "we the people" meant only white protestant people, not African Americans, or Hispanics, or Catholics or Jews.

The primary purpose of such a campaign would be to persuade voters to get out and vote. If they can be got off their bums, most can be expected to vote Democrat. The fear among Democrats at the moment is that many voters are disengaged and strife weary. They aren't enthusiastic about an uninspiring, and these days almost inarticulate, old man leading them for another four years. The fact that he has already been doing so for four years is no particular attraction, because they do not identify anything much about those years with Biden.

In general terms, the higher the turn-out the more Democrat votes there will be. That, rather than vote fraud, was why Trump lost the last election, in a modern turn-out record. At the election before, Democrat votes exceeded Republican votes by millions, but Trump won enough electoral college votes to win without fraud.

I doubt the capacity of Biden to change the dynamic of the election merely with a scare campaign. It's partly a personality thing and partly the fact that even when in safe circumstances (such as before an autocue), he is no speechmaker, no rabble rouser, no crowd mobiliser.

Moreover, his capacity to mobilise audiences and have them feel impelled to vote is not merely a function of getting them to think about what is at stake. Many younger voters, for example, are very disenchanted with Biden because of his absolute support for the state of Israel during its war on Palestinians in Gaza. This is not simply an issue that has galvanised Americans of Muslim extraction, but others who think it is now time to confront the manifest injustices practised by Israel since its inception. This is not a matter, as Biden, Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong seem to think, of occasionally expressing support for a two-state solution, while otherwise totally favouring one side.

As it happens, the British elections last week showed the impact of similar disenchantment over Gaza among Muslim voters. Sir Keir Starmer, the new British Labour Prime Minister is totally on the side of Israel, and various Muslim lobbies made it clear that as much as they welcomed the demise of Tory governments, they had few hopes over a Labour landslide. In general terms, the higher the Muslim proportion of the population in an electorate, the more likely that the Labour candidate did not win, or scraped in with only a thin majority compared with before. It involved some tactical voting, but not the creation of a confessional Muslim Party or of a coordinated national campaign. Given the landslide, it will not cause Starmer direct problems of governing, but serves as a reminder that policy-making must respect domestic political opinion as well as his perception of the significance and importance of reflex alliance with the US.

Albanese's advisers must have been smoking something when they decided that Australia should have envoys against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Envoys for it, we can expect. It is true that other nations have done something similar, but each of these countries has different domestic circumstances, including proportionate populations.

It has been said that there has been a massive increase in anti-Semitic behaviour since the events of October 7 and the Israeli attack on Gaza. That may be true, but the quantification of this will always be a matter for argument. The louder and more significant Israeli lobbies, including the one from which the envoy on anti-Semitism comes, include among their complaints of anti-Semitic behaviour anything which is critical of the political or the military actions of Israel, or of the Zionist movement. It may be true that critical references to Israel or Zionism may indicate more fundamental hostility to Jewish people or the Jewish religion, but whether that is so is not to be determined as a matter for deconstruction, semiotics or divination by agents and advocates of the cause of the state or the Zionist dream.

Even the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, asked if criticism of Israel or anti-Zionism were anti-Semitic, suggested that it could be if one criticised either with more fervour than other states or movements. I am certainly doing that right now because I think the response of Israel to October 7 has been so barbaric and ferocious as to put into question again whether Israel has ever abided by the conditions under which it was granted its national status. I have always considered that firing into civilian populations, or hospitals or schools on the basis that fighters might be inside them is a war crime. Nothing about the barbarism of October 7 excuses the indiscriminate massacre that has followed it.

I expect that the ultimate effect of the envoys in Australia will be that two existing players in Middle Eastern politics will have state-sponsored positions with which to propagandise the respective causes of Israel and Palestine, including with the capacity to ascribe all actions on the other side to religious prejudice. I very much doubt that it will lead to any outbreak of social cohesion.

Our Australian diplomats, and perhaps our intelligence services, may be better informed, or may know more quickly than others what the outcome is to be with Biden. But despite the large personal investment made by Albanese with Australian taxpayer dollars, it seems extremely unlikely that Australia will have any influence on what occurs. No one cares what Albanese, or for that matter Starmer thinks. Or even Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Albanese, however, will be thinking carefully about it. He may not have a vote at the convention or the subsequent election. But he will be thinking of an Australian election to be held in the next nine months - either between now and early December, or between late February and mid-May. In effect, before the American election or after the new president is installed? His own focus group polling suggests that voters have more confidence in the capacity of Peter Dutton to manage a transition to Trump - the bookies' choice at the moment. Not, probably, so tricky a matter if he thinks Biden, or his replacement will be returned because it will presumably mean more of the same, assuming that Trump accepts the result.

If Biden decides to stand down, he has two choices. He could simply resign as president or submit to a procedure (I hardly expect willingly) whereby he is found unfit to carry on. His Vice President Kamala Harris would automatically then become president with full executive power. She could face the November ballot with all of the benefits of incumbency, including the capacity to appear as a completely new face, with a different outlook on things. One would not expect her to repudiate Biden, to whom she has been very loyal. But Biden would have no capacity to bind her on particular policies as a formal condition for stepping down.

Alternatively, Biden might favour another candidate, or party chieftains might, leaving the candidate to be chosen by the Democrat convention in Chicago in seven weeks. Then to a two-month campaign. There are Democrat leaders who have national standing, and who would have national support. But it would be fair to say that none have the stature or national and international profile of Harris.

Even some of those who might be instinctively opposed to Harris, from the left of her party, might think that the party needs all of the help, and as few of the handicaps, as it can get. For the Democrats retaining power, (and having a presidential candidate with the "shirttails" power to pull in congressional candidates behind), is almost as important as the actual personality of the main candidate. If the senior party members believe that Biden cannot get the vote, they will have to tell him loudly and bluntly. The old bugger is a bit hard of hearing.