I’m not dead yet, protested Joe Biden yesterday. I think I’ll go for a walk. And with that, the cart-hauling corpse collector shrugged his shoulders and moved on past 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. At least temporarily.

On Wednesday, a group of Democrat governors swallowed hard and declared the president “fit for office,” while yesterday, the beleaguered Biden spoke briefly and disjointedly to a group of active-duty service members and their families at a 4th of July barbecue, then the first and second families stayed up well past bedtime to take in the fireworks from the White House balcony. All this, along with his campaign’s announcement of a $50 million swing-state ad blitz, lead us to believe he’s not going anywhere — at least not just yet.

But that doesn’t mean that his party’s power brokers aren’t scheming publicly and privately to yank him off the stage. The devil, though, is in the details.

There are at least five major roadblocks to replacing an uncooperative Joe Biden as the Democrats’ nominee: his own stubbornness; the positioning of the not-ready-for-primetime Kamala Harris as next in line; the lack of a clear-cut favorite behind Harris; the messiness of a potential mutiny at the Democratic National Convention in August; and the party’s own lofty claims about “preserving our democracy” while forcing its duly elected candidate from the scene.

Beyond these obstacles, though, there are some unlikely scenarios. As the Associated Press reports, “One involves Biden stepping aside voluntarily, the other, and by far the least likely, involves an 11th-hour effort to defeat him at the convention by winning over pledged delegates he has won in the nominations contests, who are technically obligated to support him only by ‘good conscience’ in the party’s rules.” The AP continues:

DNC rules encourage but don’t specifically require delegates to vote for the candidate they’re pledged to support. Instead, the rules say, “All delegates to the National Convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.”

In other words, the thousands of delegates Biden won during the primary season are bound only by their consciences to actually cast their votes for Biden when it comes time to select a nominee, although it would be unprecedented for delegates on a wide scale to support a candidate other than the one they were pledged to support.

The 2024 convention rules don’t directly address what happens if the guy with all the pledged delegates drops out before the convention, but there’s a general understanding that the delegates would then be free to support some other candidate. But as I pointed out the other day, if Joe goes, I just don’t see any way for the Intersectionality Party to move beyond the Bay Area progressive of Jamaican-Indian descent who grew up in Canada and whose ancestors were slaveowners.

As for historical precedents, we can look back to 1968, when, after the primaries had already begun, President Lyndon Johnson announced that he was dropping out. At the Democrats’ chaotic convention in Chicago, a strong majority of the delegates selected then-VP Hubert Humphrey to replace Johnson, even though Humphrey hadn’t participated in any of the primaries. That decidedly undemocratic approach left a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of voters, and, as the AP adds, it “prompted the party to change its rules, resulting in today’s primary system that rewards candidates based on their performance on primary and caucus ballots.”

What we have to remember about the Democrats’ convention rules is that they’ve been hammered out by party apparatchiks with a vested interest in putting forth the candidate who gives them the best chance of winning. And that candidate, right now, doesn’t appear to be Joe Biden. One other thing to pay close attention to is the money. If campaign donations begin to dry up en masse, Biden will likely be toast.

Still, like a dear old dog that has suddenly taken a slight turn for the better, Joe Biden has so far managed to avoid the vet’s euthanizing needle.

So far.