In last week’s podcast I vented thus, concerning Joe Biden and Kamala Harris:

It’s hard to believe that we shall be looking at a Biden-Harris ticket this Fall. I mean, really? A nation of a third of a billion people, and this is the best we can bring forward? …

Are the Democrats really going to run these two fifth-raters again? I don’t believe it. The regime has some kind of plan. Surely, surely …

There have been rumors—I wouldn’t put it any higher than that; if there is any actual evidence, I haven’t yet seen it—there have been rumors that, yes, our ruling class does indeed have a plan. One of those rumors in particular caught my eye over my breakfast oatmeal on Tuesday.

Pride is of course a sin; so any time I feel pride warming in my breast over the approaching twentieth anniversary of this podcast, I remind myself of opinionators whose careers have been far longer and more remunerative than mine. Here’s one of them: gossip columnist Cindy Adams.

I’m not sure how well Cindy Adams is known outside New York. She is a quintessential Manhattanite, born and raised on the Upper West Side and still living there today, in a nine-room Park Avenue penthouse by Central Park.

She will be 94 years old in April—God bless her!—and in that long life has met everyone—showbiz, politics, business—and written about them all, in some cases at book length. Her gossip column in the New York Post, my daily newspaper, has been running since 1979. So much for my piffling twenty years of podcasting!

Well, there I was Tuesday morning slurping down my oatmeal (with raisins, a banana, and a splash of milk) while perusing my morning New York Post; and there was Cindy on page 18 with an arresting opening paragraph:

Obama’s wife is scratching to maybe be our next president. Her husband’s helping. Pay attention.

 Michelle Obama may already be working on a 2024 White House bid, January 22, 2024

Michelle Obama may already be working on a 2024 White House bid https://t.co/FSXDwl4dyZ pic.twitter.com/xRvNGIDJHU

— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) January 23, 2024

Oh, I’m paying attention, Cindy.

(So was Jesse Watters over at Fox News. This same column caught his eye and he quoted from it on his Thursday evening broadcast.

And I should note the annoying fact, which always brings in a couple of correcting emails, that the date given online for an article in the Post is the date it was written, in this case Monday. It landed on my doorstep the following morning, Tuesday. Formatting differs, too: that opening paragraph is two paragraphs online. Hold the emails!)

Quoting what she calls ”credible sources few have access to”—words not to be taken lightly coming from Cindy—she tells us that Barack Obama has been polling donors on his wife’s behalf.

The plan, she has heard, is that Joe Biden will announce he’s not running after all. He’ll delay the announcement to minimize the lame-duck spell that will follow.

How much he’ll delay it, Cindy is unclear: he’ll announce either in May or else just before the convention in mid-August. The convention will then have to nominate someone else, and the regime is maneuvering for Michelle Obama to be that someone.

It’s plausible enough, even discounting for Cindy Adams’ gossipy uncertainties and lame humor. (”I think in all fairness I should give the other side its say. So to quote rumors out of the White House, drums are beating that Joe Biden’s campaign is finally heating up. Of course, it could be because he’s carrying a hibachi in his shorts.”)

The default assumption in the punditocracy is currently that voters in November will be invited to choose between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. What are the odds that will actually be the case? Less than fifty-fifty, would be my guess.

Biden can be set aside easily and honorably by some such plan as Cindy Adams has heard whispered. Trump may yet be derailed by concentrated lawfare with a big assist from the regime media; or the elites may prefer to keep him on the ticket in the confidence that any candidate other than Biden, even one as inexperienced and dimwitted as Mrs. Obama, will defeat him.

Biden-Trump? Michelle-Trump? Michelle-Nikki? We’ll find out.