"But if it turns out that her short general election campaign doesn't go well, and if she doesn't beat Trump, how much of the blame will belong directly to Joe Biden..."

"... for putting the party and Harris in this situation by discouraging anyone else from running against him by snuffing out any whiff of competition. I mean, he changed the primary calendar to favor him and him alone. He ditched Iowa and started the primaries in South Carolina, a state he knew he would win. I mean, how much of this is gonna be on him if Harris loses?"

Asks Michael Barbaro, in today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "The Coronation of Kamala Harris."

NYT reporter Reid J. Epstein answers:

Well, you should be clear that Biden made a choice to seek reelection, but it was the rest of the party, with the exception of a little known congressman from Minnesota who made the collective decision not to challenge Joe Biden for reelection. You know, I remember having conversations with people before Biden formally entered the race, that there would've been tens of millions of dollars available for a candidate in the mold of Bernie Sanders to run from Biden's left. There was talk of billionaire candidates like JB Pritzker getting in the race and self-funding. But I don't think it's necessarily fair to blame Biden for the lack of competition. 

It's the rest of the party that covered their eyes and told everyone that Biden would be fine, that bear more of the responsibility on this front. And that makes me wonder, as a concluding question here, do you think that the Democratic party needs to just have a bigger conversation about competition and about more people entering into these races? I mean, there's no absence of competition on the Republican side, despite the huge way in which Donald Trump looms over that party. You had multiple governors running against him this year, despite his obvious strengths and nothing on the Democratic side. 

And so is that a conversation you expect the Democrats to start having? Really, no matter how this turns out... this is less a story about competition as it is a story about the elites of the party not listening to their own voters. There was ample evidence over years that large percentages of Democrats did not want Joe Biden to run for a second term. Hmm. But when he did, they all stepped aside and gave him a glide path to the nomination anyway. And the result that they got was a deeply flawed nominee who couldn't make it to the finish line. And now it's so late in the game that there's no time to have a real competition to replace him.

Epstein and Barbaro never use the word "coronation," but the episode is titled "The Coronation of Kamala Harris." There are so many articles out there right now speaking of what just happened for Kamala as a "coronation." 

AND: Earlier in the podcast:

BARBARO: Why do you think that so many Democrats are lining up so quickly behind Kamala Harris within the past hour or so that now includes former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and why is there no real challenge to her given all that information?

EPSTEIN: Well, there's no challenge to her because Joe Biden made it practically impossible to challenge her. There was a brief window of about 20 minutes after Biden withdrew from the presidential campaign and before he endorsed Harris for someone else to run against her. 

BARBARO: 20 minutes!

EPSTEIN: I don't remember exactly how long it was, but it was after I saw that he had dropped out and before I got home from the pool that he had endorsed Harris. And when he did that, he didn't just transfer political support to her, he also transferred the $96 million that his campaign had in the bank, and he transferred the 1300 people who worked for the campaign for him to her. And so for anyone to run a truncated campaign that was gonna take place in just a couple of weeks targeting the 4,600 delegates to the Democratic Convention, $96 million to zero is a tough place to start.