"I Support Joe Biden"
Joe Biden's Remarkable Responses In SC "Town Hall" On Eve Of 2020 Democratic Primary
What we're up against:
"The Daily Show" Lets Trump Cultists Reveal Their Own Stupidity And Obsequious Boot-Licking
"Joe Biden Just Shamed Me"
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I never learn. None of us pundits do.
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In my newsletter three weeks ago, I asked: “What in God’s name happened to Joe Biden?” I was referring to his miserable showings in the Iowa caucuses and then the New Hampshire primary, and I was sounding the death knell for his presidential candidacy.
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I didn’t go as far as to say that he was done. But I sure as hell implied it, and I brimmed confidently with reasons that he couldn’t go the distance and get the Democratic nomination:
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He was too unsteady. Too old. Too yesterday. How could someone so oriented toward the past sufficiently inspire Americans who were looking to the future?
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Well, Biden inspired or at least appealed to enough voters yesterday to stage one of the most extraordinary political comebacks I’ve ever witnessed. On Super Tuesday he emphatically halted Bernie Sanders’s momentum and remade the Democratic primary into a two-man race: Biden versus Sanders. I explored that at length in a quickie analysis of the returns that The Times published early this morning.
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Right now I’d give Biden the edge over Sanders. Why? Because when you look at the last 96 hours, what you see — at least what I do — is a Democratic Party that’s desperate to unite behind someone so that it can fast-forward to the battle to vanquish President Trump and hold on to its fiercest energy for that.
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You see an itch to get on board with a likely winner, and a likely winner is someone who has won a lot. Biden won a lot on Super Tuesday, claiming victory in nine of the 14 states that voted. Sanders won or was poised to win four, including the delegate mother lode of California. A final state, Maine, remained too close to call as this newsletter went to bed.
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As I wrote in my analysis, Biden “won in places where black voters make all the difference and in places where they don’t. He won in places — Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma — where he hadn’t even competed. He won Virginia by 30 points. He won Texas, where Sanders’s outreach to Latino voters was supposed to put him over the top. He won and won and won, taking the overall lead in the delegate count.”
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What to make of Sanders’s disappointment? It’s no knock on him to say that he has been, and is, asking Democratic voters to take a very big leap. Yes, he’s beating Trump in many polls that posit a contest between the two of them. But Sanders bears little similarity to the Democratic nominees who won the presidency over recent decades. His proposals, his language and his personal history place him emphatically to their left. Maybe that reflects where Americans are moving. But maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s just a bulging storehouse of easy ammunition for Trump.
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I’ve been watching for Democratic voters to get the jitters about Sanders, and that may be happening. At least that’s one possible Super Tuesday takeaway. (Other takeaways include Mike Bloomberg’s epic embarrassment — he spent more than $500 million to win only American Samoa — and his laudable exit from this race this morning.) Biden beat Sanders even in states where Sanders beat Hillary Clinton four years ago. He roared and he romped.
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I think that’s because Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar were out of the competition by Super Tuesday and Bloomberg had been severely bruised. (When the history of this primary is written, it will show that Elizabeth Warren, who vivisected Bloomberg in the Democratic debates, did Biden a great service.) So Biden became the default alternative to Sanders. And many Democrats wanted an alternative.
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So will Biden be the nominee? Well, his flaws haven’t vanished: I still hold my breath when he starts to speak, because so many of the sentences that zoom out of his mouth veer in the direction of disaster. It’s a mercy if they stall in the weigh station of incoherence. But my main hesitation to make any predictions is that I have learned, at long last and at least a little.
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This Democratic primary has taught me to expect the unexpected. But then I was schooled in that during the Republican primary four years ago — and promptly forgot the lesson.
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