Gail Collins is a partisan Democrat columnist for The New York Times. How partisan? From 2007 through Election Day 2020, she wrote 58 columns that included the story that Mitt Romney put his Irish setter on the roof of his car in a luggage crate on a family vacation trip to Canada. She’s so partisan that when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, she wanted George W. Bush to resign so Obama could be inaugurated on the spot.

It’s in this vein that Collins has taken up the story of Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) running against President Joe Biden for the Democratic Party nomination. She’s expressing relief that Phillips has no plans to run as a third-party candidate in the fall. She wishes Biden had drawn some intimidating challengers in these nearly invisible primaries.

“Imagine the great race the Democrats could have if Biden, 81, decided he was stepping down,” she wrote. “It’d be further evidence he was a terrific president. So eager to remember him as a terrific president.” He’s not stepping down, and he’s horrible, not terrific.

But Collins is already bracing for the fall with Biden having Jimmy Carter-level approval ratings. A third-party “threat” is “always worrisome when it comes to messing things up,” like Ralph Nader taking votes away from Al Gore in 2000. “I still haven’t forgiven him.”

She added to the “spoiler” list Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who drained votes from Hillary Clinton in 2016 and “won enough votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to cost Hillary Clinton the White House.” Democrats can’t imagine anyone would vote for a far-left candidate because there’s no way they’d vote for the Establishment Democrat.

Stein is running again in 2024, so Collins warned: “You don’t want to go down in history as the progressive candidate whose third-party run drained just enough votes from Biden to put Trump back in the White House. (Looking at you, Cornel West.)”

Then Collins brought up “the dreaded No Labels people,” who might run Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). She wrote “the idea of Joe Manchin as president is pretty terrifying, but in the real world, the most No Labels could do is take votes away from Biden.”

Collins can’t acknowledge the irony of the Democratic Party trashing anyone who would want to participate in democracy by running for president. She noted how Phillips found some state Democrat parties have refused to allow anyone but Biden on the primary ballot.

The Left is addicted to power, and they’re not at all idealistic about it. They will crush people to acquire power and to maintain it. You can double that feeling of anti-democratic menace when the alternative is Donald Trump.

Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.

Editorial cartoon by Gary Varvel (Creators Syndicate)