Summary: Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, written off and given up for dead just four days ago, came roaring back to life last night. As a substantial number of pundits and commentators of the chattering class have already observed, Joe dramatically overperformed in the super Tuesday states, even in Texas, which the commentariat had assumed would be blowout Bernard Sanders territory. What a difference a day can make. If yesterday morning Joe’s campaign was preparing for a long night of damage control, this afternoon Joe is, if not the prohibitive favorite, certainly the undisputed front runner in the Democratic primary. Meanwhile, Sanders nation is passing through the first of Elisabeth Kubler- Ross’s five stages of grief, anger and denial.
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Cathedral City, March 5, 2020 – what a difference a day makes, twenty-four little hours. Yesterday morning, as the Super Tuesday primary got underway, the pundits and commentators of the chattering class had Joe Biden’s Presidential campaign on life support, preparing to administer to it metaphorical last rites. Yet, the anticipated viaticum proved to have been premature.
Capitalizing on the momentum he picked up in his blowout victory in South Carolina, Biden dramatically overperformed in the super Tuesday contests. Indeed, Joe’s performance may be likened to the 18th century Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, that serious of fortuitous events whereby Prussia and King Frederick the Great were saved from a combined Russian and Austrian invasion, and the course of the entire Seven Years War was fundamentally altered. Though uncalled California remains a byword for incompetence and inefficiency in counting its votes, (something for which California Secretary of State Alex Padilla should face serious repercussions at the polls or by way of recall) Joe took ten of the 14 super Tuesday states, including the presumptive Sanders strongholds of Minnesota and Texas. Moreover, even-in slow-to-count-its-ballots California, Joe easily surpassed the 15% threshold required for delegate allocation.
If, during the early hours of yesterday, the Biden campaign was preparing for a long night of damage control, this morning, the landscape appears to have changed considerably. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had positioned himself through the early contests as the moderate alternative to Joe Biden, bowed out of the race this morning and endorsed the former Vice President.
As moderate Democratic candidates have, metaphorically speaking, bent the knee for Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren as the last far left candidate other than Bernard Sanders left in the race is said to be evaluating her future, (read, she is probably trying to negotiate her own departure from the contest) the race seems to be tightening to a two-man contest between two Caucasian septuagenarians.
And while one of the septuagenarians seems to have got his groove back, rejoicing in the recovery of his mojo, the other septuagenarian, that sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist, that mendacious misogynist, that loudmouthed Leninist, that blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, is growing more shrill, more angry, and more unhinged at the unraveling of his campaign.
While Bernard Sanders contemplates the altogether uncongenial fact that his vaunted youth vote, which he expected to turn out for him in vast numbers, displayed its usual shortsighted indifference to the importance of showing up, preferring instead to wage war behind their keyboards, he, like Donald Trump, appears to be decompensating in real time. And as Sanders engages in Trumpian decompensation, he and his supporters are displaying both anger and denial that the electorates in the super Tuesday states appeared not to have agreed with his position that he is somehow entitled by Divine Right to the Democratic nomination.
Indeed, the Sanders people are already pushing easily debunked conspiracy theories, touting a stab-in-the-back narrative, a Dolchstoßlegende of DNC perfidy that shows disturbing affinities to the one eagerly propagated by the NSDAP against Germany’s Weimar Republic. The two initial stages of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s grieving process, denial and anger, seem to be playing out in their fullest form in the churlish, graceless, intransigent response of Sanders and his campaign.
We are seeing very much a repetition of what happened after super Tuesday in 2016. Hillary Clinton swept the South, making deep inroads into the African-American Democratic primary electorates of the states of the old Confederacy. Then, as now, Sanders, whose inability to reach out to middle-aged and older voters of color has been well documented, dismissed the African-American electorate as part of the so-called establishment, a fact which has not been lost on middle-aged and older African-American voters, many of whom remember how the African-American vote was suppressed and prevented throughout the South during the Jim Crow years.
We are also seeing a repetition of the intransigent 2016 posture of Sanders and his supporters as his path to the nomination, which he had thought would be paved by his successes in small, non-diverse, largely white, caucus states, narrowed as Hillary Clinton pwned his ass in the diverse primary states which make up the backbone of the Democratic electorate.
While the Sanders people have retreated into the same 2016 posture of defiance as Japanese holdouts on Pacific islands continuing the struggle long after the Shōwa Emperor’s surrender order of August, 1945, the Biden campaign has made the same kind of astonishing recovery that the United States made after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Unfortunately, Sanders nation seems incapable of understanding that the dynamic of the primary has changed. He is underperforming his numbers from 2016, and as always, his supporters are alienating potential allies with the intransigence, misogyny, homophobia, and general all-round nastiness of their behavior.
While the cultists and zealots of the Sanders personality cult are waving their arms and stamping their feet and holding their breath till they turn blue, the Empire has struck back.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City - where he served two terms as the city councilmember- and who practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He is not embarrassed to acknowledge that he is ridin’ with Biden, and feels a certain measure of Schadenfreude at the discomfiture of the Burlington Bolshevik and supporters. The opinions herein are his own. He expects to be attacked by Berners, and will use whatever force is necessary to repel the kind of physical attack the Joe Biden was subjected to by angry, vegan Berners during his victory speech last night in Los Angeles.
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