The Daily Telegraph of London reported it as admitted rumor, a matter of Biden White House inside talk worthy of an Aaron Sorkin-written episode of "West Wing."
The paper defended spreading rumor by saying the rumor provided evidence of the extraordinary attention being paid to the Democrats' acute problems at the top of the ticket for 2024.
I suspect that's fair enough. I write about it today because it's fun, and, while unlikely by risk and backlash, not altogether crazy or implausible.
The story begins with the sudden widely discussed and even accepted assertion that Joe Biden, 79, can't run again on account of age and the perils of asking Americans to trust his competence through age 86.
The story is fueled by circumstances driving Biden's approval rating to 38 percent. Conceivably, an approval rating of 55 percent or better would make him younger.
The story is propelled by the sudden widely accepted assertion that Vice President Kamala Harris is a flop. Her approval rating is 28. Her likability is low, which is simply the lot of some personalities and styles. Her competence is not evident. She doesn't appear to have commanded anything she's been assigned.
So, yes, though we're not yet out of 2021, the Telegraph runs with the heavy chatter that Democrats need to get about the business of finding someone not Harris to nominate for president post-Biden.
There always is the option of letting things take their course: Joe bows out, Harris announces, other Democrats see weakness and jump into the race, and you have a high-visibility free-for-all that produces the strong that survives.
Many leading Democrats, this article says, don't like that option. They worry about deep Democratic division between the progressive and the reasonable, the Black and the white liberal, the urban-suburban and the rural, and the educated elite and the working class. They prefer the idea of orchestrating the pre-anointment of a nominee presenting a best-case scenario for finessing or blending all of that.
Keeping Donald Trump from returning to the White House is worth every bit of the hand-wringing.
So, with all that said, this is the rumor reported by the Telegraph: Biden would privately acknowledge that it's not wise for him to run again and that the responsible thing to do is design the strongest succession possible, which Harris doesn't provide.
Thus he would, if presented the opportunity, nominate Harris for the U.S. Supreme Court. She once had a much better reputation as a whiz-bang lawyer and California attorney general. Barack Obama wanted to consider her for Supreme Court nomination--the high court needing a woman of color--but she removed herself from consideration because she preferred to run for the U.S. Senate and pursue an ambition for the presidency.
Democrats would use the "nuclear option" disallowing the filibuster on high-court nominations to get Harris confirmed by a simple majority vote of the Senate assuming Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema would join in, at which point Harris, as the sitting vice president, would cast the tiebreaking vote and essentially put herself on the Supreme Court.
The Republican howling would be countered by Biden's selection of a new vice president carefully chosen to be the party's presumptive and strongest possible nominee in 2024.
That's the end of the published report, which leaves unanswered the question of whom might that replacement vice president and presumed strongest nominee be.
It reveals both the Democratic Party's weak farm club and the nation's remarkably rapid attitudinal advancement on sexual orientation that, at the moment, the name unmentioned by the Telegraph but coming up first elsewhere is that of the gay guy--Pete Buttigieg.
As Transportation secretary, Buttigieg will oversee the great bulk of $1.2 trillion in new spending, an opportunity to succeed famously or fail miserably. Either way, he becomes the most visible Biden-administration figure not Biden, which includes, fatefully, Harris.
Then there is the new movie about Buttigieg on Amazon Prime--"Mayor Pete," which takes a backstage look at his uncommonly successful presidential race last year until Jim Clyburn endorsed Biden and delivered the Black vote and the nomination.
The film shows Buttigieg to be likable, engaging, smart, reflective and conceivably relatable and authentic. Reviews call the movie either a glorified campaign commercial or an insightful documentary, and I agree with the reviews.
The point is that Buttigieg warrants a film on Amazon Prime while Harris checks in at 28 percent approval.
Buttigieg has one problem, which is relating to Black voters. He routed Biden in white Iowa and white New Hampshire, but then was endorsing Biden 10 days later after Clyburn endorsed Biden in South Carolina with the simply profound point that Black people knew Joe and Joe knew Black people.
You can't easily win the Democratic nomination without Black votes and you can't easily win the presidency as a Democrat without heavy Black voting. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama won. Michael Dukakis and John Kerry didn't.
It's almost as basic as relatability versus elitism. It's mostly two things.
One is this idea that the oppression of the two groups is similar or even equal, when one encompasses human bondage and the other has to do with people, like Buttigieg, generally well-off and well-educated and treating race as less than the flaming issue but one on a list of burning and presumably co-equal issues with climate, sexual orientation and the plight of all workers.
The second is a cultural disconnection, one I'd cite as evident in Little Rock with the inability of City Director Kathy Webb and Mayor Frank Scott--who in one sense ought to be able to lead a progressive wave for the city--to get along.
I remember attorney Richard Mays of Little Rock telling me early in Clinton's presidential race in 1992 that Clinton would win because "the man relates" to Black people, emphasizing and stretching out "relates" as if it were a mystical or magic word.
Blacks knew Joe and Joe knew Blacks. Harris, a woman of color, had dropped out of the Democratic presidential race long before South Carolina, failed from ineptitude and the fact that she couldn't pry Biden from a history of good will on race.
So, those are lot of words to convey what distills to a simple fact: The Democrats are in kind of a mess.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.