NEGOTIATING DÉTENTE

A beginning is a very delicate time.

                -Frank Herbert, Dune

"There is nothing left for me to do but go and see General Grant and I would rather die a thousand deaths."
   
                -Gen. Robert E. Lee, CSA, before surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, April, 1865

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds....

                -Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865

We have fought this fight as long, and as well as we know how. We have been defeated. For us as a Christian people, there is now but one course to pursue. We must accept the situation.

                -Gen. Lee

We wuz robbed!

                -Boxing manager Joe Jacobs, after his fighter, Max Schmeling had lost a controversial split decision to boxer Jack Sharkey, 1932.

Summary: Word has surfaced that within the last 24 to 48 hours talks have been underway between staffers for the campaigns of former Vice President Joe Biden and Independent Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders, ostensibly to coordinate messaging concerning the coronavirus pandemic that has the country scared shitless and in economic freefall. Rumor has it that in addition to talking about the Outbreak, the staffers are negotiating what amounts to the surrender of the Sanders campaign. If so, the negotiations need to be carried out with an appreciation for the delicacy of the enterprise upon which the negotiators are embarked.

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Cathedral City, March 19, 2020 – Yesterday afternoon, stories surfaced in various media outlets to the effect that pourparlers have been occurring between the campaign staffs of former Vice President Joe Biden and Independent Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders.

The ostensible purpose of the talks has been the coordination of the campaigns of the two Democratic presidential contenders on messaging concerning the coronavirus outbreak that has not only scared the nation shitless, but which has also plunged the nation and the world into what may well be the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Rumor has it that in addition to discussing the Outbreak, the staffers are negotiating what amounts to an armistice, a surrender of the Sanders campaign. If so, such an armistice must be negotiated with the greatest of care. It will be important to preserve Sen. Sanders’s “face,” that subtle Chinese cultural construct expressed as miànzi or lianshàng, implying reputation, self-respect, honor, prestige, or social standing.

From a Chinese cultural perspective, it is always important in negotiation, particularly if there is a power dynamic differential, to ensure that the party holding the preponderance of power does not “take away” the face of the less powerful party. In English, the concept of saving face has been devised as an opposite of losing face, and has been retconned into Mandarin Chinese as bao miànzi, meaning to guard/save face.

It will be necessary to bao miànzi with respect to Sen. Sanders to ensure that he and Vice President Biden can establish a workable détente to carry forward the critical enterprise of ensuring the defeat of the Cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing Shitgibbon that is Donald Trump.  In beginning this new détente, it will be critical for both sides to realize, as Frank Herbert put it in his magisterial 1965 novel Dune, that a beginning is a very delicate time. It will be a time when both sides will need to be exquisitely discreet, exquisitely careful, and exquisitely sensitive. It will be a very delicate time in which the slightest miscalculation or actual or perceived slight may be enough to derail the whole enterprise.

If, in fact, Sen. Sanders is preparing an exit strategy, or if his staff is indeed in armistice/surrender negotiations with Vice President Biden’s staff, staffers for the quondam vice president will need to understand that both Sen. Sanders and his followers, redeless though many of them may be, will be going through the ineluctable Elisabeth Kübler-Ross five stages of grieving, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance.

No doubt, if Sen. Sanders is preparing to and his campaign, he may well be feeling the anguish that Marse Robert Lee felt during that penultimate week of Lent in April, 1865, when he acknowledged to his aide de camp, the Baltimore lawyer Lt. Col. Charles Marshall, in phraseology that could have come straight from William Shakespeare himself, that "[t]here is nothing left for me to do but go and see General Grant and I would rather die a thousand deaths." 

Under such circumstances, it will be absolutely incumbent upon Vice President Biden and his staff to have before them the sentiments and the soaring words of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address:

[W]ith malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the [Democratic Party’s] wounds...,

And to be guided by them.

As far as Sen. Sanders is concerned, he and his campaign staff would be well advised, mutatis mutandis, to take counsel of Gen. Lee’s admonition to his staff:

    We have fought this fight as long, and as well as we know how. We have been defeated. For us as a Christian people, there is now but one course to pursue. We must accept the situation.

In short, it is now time for cooler heads on both sides of the intra-Democratic divide to have space to prevail. The Sanders campaign has fought as long as it knew how, as well as it knew how. And though Sen. Sanders does not share Gen. Lee’s Conformist Episcopal religion, the statesmanlike response to the fact of his ineluctable defeat must be to accept the situation.  

By the same token, the Biden campaign, which came back from nothing, which had its El Alamein moment in South Carolina, and subsequently went from victory to victory and strength to strength, also needs to accept that the path to victory in the November election necessarily has to include a working détente with Sen. Sanders and his more pragmatic supporters.

Of course, there will be that fraction of irreconcilables and intransigents in the Sanders campaign who, like Japanese holdouts on Pacific islands continuing the Pacific War long after the Shōwa Emperor’s Gyokuon-hōsō surrender broadcast, will want to carry on the fight, insisting, like boxing manager Joe Jacobs after his fighter, Max Schmeling, was bested in the ring by Jack Sharkey in 1932, “we wuz robbed!”

Now, many of these irreconcilables and intransigents are either antisocial, pugilistic, confrontational, chip-always-on-the-shoulder types for whom the Sanders campaign offered them an officially sanctioned vehicle to misbehave, an opportunity to rumble, or they were trolls, agents provocateurs from the other, Republican, side.

Along the way, these irreconcilables and intransigents, these Berniebros who became such a phenomenon during the campaigns of both 2016 and this year, did incalculable, irreparable harm to the Sanders campaign. If they were agents provocateurs owing their true allegiance to Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and/or the Kremlin, the venality and dishonesty of their motives can be easily understood.

On the other hand, if they were truly the kind of street brawlers they appear to have been, then the fault must be apportioned between them and the candidate himself. If in fact the Berniebros were truly loyal to their candidate, they can be justifiably taxed with an appalling lack of self-awareness. That lack of self-awareness, in its turn, led them to generate a tsunami of disdain and ill will, not only for them, before the Vermont senator himself. Indeed, Sen. Sanders himself can be faulted in his turn for his own lack of self-awareness in not perceiving early enough the enormous harm the Bros were doing to his campaigns, both this hear and in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, whom Joe Beden is emphatically not.

In short, Bernie was at least partially done in by his Bros, and it will now be incumbent upon him to cut them loose forthwith in the bluntest possible fashion if a working détente with the Biden campaign is to be established, and if, on the basis of that détente, victory can be organized against Donald Trump.

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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is a Democratic attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council. He practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. The views contained herein are his own, unless readers find them congenial, in which case, they can be theirs, too.

MATHEMATICAL IMPOSSIBILITIES AND THE NECESSITY OF UNION

Summary: Joe Biden swept the three primaries that were held tonight in Florida, Illinois, and Arizona. His double-digit victory is in each primary have caused Bernie Sanders’s path to the Democratic Party’s nomination to narrow to the point where it is mathematically almost impossible for the Independent Vermont senator to make up his delegate deficit. As I suggested yesterday, now is the time for Bernard Sanders to declare “ideological victory” and pull out. Now is also the time for the Biden campaign to do what Joe Biden himself has recognized as necessary: bring as many Sanders voters as possible into the fold to wage our struggle against incipient American fascism. Unity makes strength. Let us say to all the Sanders supporters who are willing to join us, “welcome back to the fight. Now we know our side will win."
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Cathedral City, March 17, 2020 –- Resurgent candidate Joe Biden swept the three Democratic primaries that were held tonight in Florida, Illinois, and Arizona. Not only did he sweep the primaries, he did so by margins that were not even close. In Florida, Biden carried every county in the state and cleaned Bernie’s clock 62 to 29. In Illinois, Biden romped away, 59-36 with every county in the state except Champaign County, where the University vote gave Sanders a small, three-point lead. In Arizona, Biden’s margin of victory was 42-30, with the former Vice President carrying 12 of the state’s 15 counties, all of them except the relatively small population counties of Coconino, Apache, and Yuma.

In short, Bernard Sanders crashed and burned tonight as Biden cemented his status as the prohibitive front runner for the Democratic nomination. For Sanders even to be able to recover, he would have to be able to win every upcoming primary by close to 60%, a mathematical impossibility. In short, the Democratic primary campaign is as good as over, and Joe Biden will be the nominee of the Democratic Party.

But, while Joe is certainly at this point the prohibitive front runner, there is a certain risk that an extreme element of fringe Sanders supporters will continue the struggle run up to the convention, and perhaps beyond. Like Japanese holdouts on Pacific islands, continuing the Pacific War long after the Shōwa Emperor’s Gyokuon Hōsō surrender broadcast, these intransigents, these #neverbiden, #bernieorbust bitter-enders will never be reconciled to Joe as a candidate, and may very well throw their support to that horrid, Cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing, Russophile Shitgibbon Donald Trump.

Other Sanders supporters, however, may conduct themselves like the vast majority of the population of Japan, who, after Shōwa’s Gyokuon Hōsō surrender broadcast, reconciled themselves with surprising equanimity both to military defeat and American occupation. While the Japanese certainly did not fall in love with their tall, somewhat aromatic, somewhat uncivilized-by-Japanese-standards American occupiers, they did fall into line as the Emperor had instructed them to do, and with increasing mutual familiarity came increasing mutual respect. Indeed, the special relationship between the United States and Japan was largely formed out of the adversity of the American occupation and the generous American assistance to Japan to enable the Empire to rebuild.
 
This should be the model for how the Biden campaign brings into the fold those members of Sanders nation who are willing to fall into line behind the standardbearer. Now it is been common, on both sides of the Biden-Sanders divide, to nurture a certain measure of animosity across that divide. If it is now time for pragmatic Sanders supporters to get behind Joe in our struggle against incipient American fascism, it is just as much the time for Joe and his supporters to be conciliatory and magnanimous.

Indeed, the Biden campaign has tracked very closely what Winston Churchill described as “the moral of the work” in his magisterial six volume History of the Second World War:

In War, Resolution
In Defeat, Defiance
In Victory, Magnanimity
In Peace, Goodwill.

Indeed, the history of the Biden campaign thus far has been remarkably similar to the history of the Allied effort during the Second World War. After the early caucuses and primaries, many had been prepared to write off the quondam Vice President. But then came South Carolina, which was in every way Joe Biden’s Alamein. And as Winston Churchill put it, “before Alamein, we never had a victory; after Alamein, we never had a defeat.” So, too with Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

Now, however, as the tide turns inexorably, inevitably, and ineluctably in Joe Biden’s direction, the work of unifying the Democratic Party must begin to take precedence. It will be important to concede to Sen. Sanders a certain measure of space within which to pass through the five Elisabeth Kübler-Ross stages of grieving. Biden supporters themselves must find a magnanimity of spirit to recognize that it is given to very few to put themselves into the arena of an American presidential contest.

Speaking at the Paris Sorbonne on April 23, 1910, former Pres. Theodore Roosevelt delivered what is perhaps the most famous speech of his career. In the seventh paragraph of his address, Roosevelt spoke of the man in the arena:

    “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who ‘but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier.’”

More than a century later, we may speak thus of all of our Democratic candidates who have placed themselves in the arena of a presidential contest. We can appreciate the willingness of the Kamala Harris, a Pete Buttigieg, an Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren, or any of the other Democratic candidates this year, including Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, or Andrew Yang, to name just a few.

And now, as we prepare to say goodbye to Bernard Sanders as a presidential candidate, let us remember that he, too, has been one of those courageous men and women in the arena who strove valiantly.

All of our candidates have striven valiantly, all of them have erred, all of them have come short, but all of them have displayed a kind of bravery and fortitude that many of us would quail to try to summon. As the struggle winds down, and as the party prepares for what may well be the most consequential election our history, an election that may well determine whether this nation, under God, lives or dies, we can afford to tender thanks to our Democrats and independents who offered themselves to the vortex of public debate in the conviction that America needs, that America wants, that America deserves a president who will honor her values, her commitments, and the nobility of her revolutionary democratic-republican heritage.

So, let us be prepared, when Bernie Sanders bows out of the race, which he must shortly do, to be magnanimous to him and to his followers whom it is incumbent upon Joe Biden and his supporters to welcome into the fold as part of a unified effort. As Paul Henried, playing Victor Laszlo in Casablanca, said near the end of the movie to Humphrey Bogart, playing Rick, “Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win.” In unity there is strength.

“L’Union fait la force. La révolution americain continue. L'Edifice commence à craquer. Tout le monde à la bataille!”

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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. The views expressed herein are his own, unless you find them congenial, in which case, they can be yours, too.

TREASONABLE INCOMPETENCE

Summary: Reading Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is like reading an eerie precapitulation of the health crisis which has now descended upon us. The COVID-19 crisis, naysayers in both the queer and straight camps notwithstanding, ineluctably reminds many of us of the original outbreak of the AIDS epidemic the better part of 40 years ago. Only this one may well get even worse. The Trump administration’s response to this health crisis, has been feeble at best, and, at worst, constitutes treasonable incompetence, albeit a godsend for an administration which despises freedom and essential Liberty. If, as a result of this contagion, we uncritically cast aside what Benjamin Franklin called essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, we will lose both. The forfeit the Trump administration pays for its treasonable incompetence and its all-out, Russian-style, assault on our freedoms should not be a pleasant one. Let the guillotines be unlimbered.

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Cathedral City, March 15, 2020 – as the COVID-19/coronavirus outbreak gets worse, and many of us begin to practice a more exclusive form of social distancing than we had ever been accustomed to, introverts are having a field day. This introvert marked the occasion by downloading a digital copy of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, describing the Great Plague of London in 1665. 

Reading it, with all the descriptions of the etiology and transmission history of the London plague year, put me in mind not only of this year’s Covid-19/coronavirus contagion, but also of that personally-consequential-for-me year of 1981, the year I graduated from high school, the year I matriculated at Vanderbilt University, and the year I learned what it meant to be a “deterred applicant” when my anticipated career in the United States Navy foundered on the rock of the so-called 123 Words declaring “homosexuality is incompatible with military service.”

Yet, if I was deterred from serving in the United States Navy because Ronald Reagan had decided to repay the debt he owed to that fascist Jerry Falwell and his crew of triumphalist, Protestant evangelical Nonconformist heretics, 1981 was consequential in my queer life for an even darker reason. As I was preparing to go off to college, parallel stories ran in both the Los Angeles Times and in the New York Times on the same July 3 of that year, headlined “rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals.” Even at 17, I could feel the chill wind of some great impending disaster. I had an inchoate sense that something terrible was about to befall the queer nation.

As summer gave way to fall that year, as I picked up the pieces of the naval career I never had, and as I inwardly came to terms with the fact that I, too, was a queer boy, the news just got worse and worse. All around the country, gay men were getting sick and dying of complications from what at first was known as GRID, Gay Related Immune Deficiency. It was not until well into the epidemic, when GRID began to appear in straight people with no same-sex sexual history that it acquired the name by which it is now known: AIDS. But whether GRID or AIDS, this apparently new pestilence wrought terrible execution in at risk communities.

Yet, AIDS remained largely outside the consciousness of straight America. Its targets tended to be members of marginalized communities: queerfolk, natives of Haiti, intravenous drug users, and sub-Saharan Africans. For white, straight, Reagan America, these communities were nothing but diseased pariahs who could be easily ignored because of their lack of apparent political power. It took Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of conservative America, until 1986 publicly to utter the word AIDS. And it took the death of Hollywood idol Rock Hudson to jolt the Reagan White House into awareness that something was happening, even among the Hollywood community among whom the Reagans had been accustomed to move before the California electorate so unwisely elevated him to the governorship in place of Pat Brown in 1966.

The early years of the AIDS epidemic, those years before AIDS was reduced to a relatively manageable disease rather than being an assured death penalty, scared a lot of queerfolk very badly. If, in 1981-1982 I had been making preparations to come out as a gay man, the AIDS pestilence put the kibosh on such plans, causing me to withdraw so deep into the closet that I still carry a vestigial aroma of cedar with me. My lengthy self isolation in that closet meant that when I emerged, Narnia looked a lot different than I expected. The AIDS crisis tried the queer community as if in a refiner’s fire, Malachi 3:2-3:3. Much of what we learned about the politics of homosexuality we learned by metaphorically taking it to The Man. The pestilence was, for the queer nation at large, a protracted version of the three days of Stonewall.

The COVID-19/coronavirus outbreak is qualitatively different in certain respects. While it certainly recapitulates the AIDS crisis in terms of the suddenness of its emergence, and in terms of the pestilential aspect, it is more frightening than the AIDS epidemic insofar as the intricacies of transmission make it a helluva lot more dangerous. With AIDS, the intricacies of transmission, intravenous drug use aside, essentially required one to be a receptive partner in sexual intercourse. More vulgarly, you essentially had to get fucked for the intricacies of transmission to work against you. With COVID-19/coronavirus, the contagion does not require intimate personal contact, and may well be airborne. 

While this was the fear of the epidemiological community during the early months and years of the AIDS crisis, HIV never mutated to become airborne. The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is remarkably delicate creature that does not survive outside the human body. We learned, rather quickly, that you can’t get AIDS from sitting on a toilet seat, for example. On the other hand, we have no such assurance with COVID-19/coronavirus.  

With more and more cases of COVID-19/coronavirus attributable to so-called community transmission, i.e., the physicians have no idea what the etiology of a particular case is, and with the virus not being limited to particular ethnicity, drug use, sexual orientation, or other “at risk” “discrete and insular” Footnote Four communities (United States v. Carolene Products Co., (1938) 304 U.S. 144, fn. 4 at 152), but apparently targeting the entirety of the population, irrespective of race, religion, sexual identity or orientation, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, all of us have just cause to be, if not scared shitless, at least somewhat concerned for our own physical well-being. 

The response of the Trump administration to this latest health crisis has been feeble and tepid at best. At worst, the administration’s indifference, xenophobia, and cruelty merit the descriptor of “treasonable incompetence.” To this administration, the coronavirus crisis, which is in the first, pestilential, stage of its evolution, must represent a godsend. The American public has supinely accepted invasions of civil liberties and diminutions of civil society that at any other time in American history would have led to mass street protests. But now, given that the American public has been habituated by Donald Trump to a constant experience of low-level dread, we’ve lived down to P.J. O’Rourke’s mordant characterization of Americans as people who would happily scrap the Constitution to find the missing kids on the sides of the milk cartons.

And while we are drinking our milk from cartons from which the missing children’s faces stare at us across our Wheaties or our cornflakes, we forget the words of that great history of pre-conquest England, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which reminds us of the danger of appeasement or scrapping liberties. “For once you have paid the Danegeld,” that is, the money paid to the invading Danes to induce them to go away, “you can never get rid of the Dane.” 

Closer to our own time, Benjamin Franklin sounded a similar warning:  "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." As the Trump administration’s bungled, treasonably incompetent response to the COVID-19/coronavirus crisis has led to the progressive shutting down of many of the activities of our civil life, together with the fraying of many of the institutions of our civil society, including our public institutions of self-government, and as we become more and more habituated to well-meaning, but unmindful-of-the-future public health and political authorities circumscribing essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, we find ourselves in danger of losing both.

The Trump administration, with its acknowledged fondness for authoritarian rulers of every stripe, will happily fan the flames of fear and contagion to lay the groundwork for a government in Vladimir Putin’s image. Such a thing should not be allowed to happen, even if we have to cough and wheeze our way to the courthouse where the trial of Donald Trump and his organized crime family is occurring. For what could be a godsend to Trump may have to be the spark that becomes the flames of a second Lexington and Concord in which the Trump organized crime family and its corrupt enablers pay the forfeit for their treasonable incompetence and destruction of American Liberty.

Citoyens, la patrie et en danger. 

Ou sont les guillotines?  Mort aux responsables!

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 Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city council, and who practiced law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage.  The views set forth herein are his own.

DECLARING VICTORY AND PULLING OUT: WHY BERNIE SANDERS SHOULD TAKE THE ADVICE OF THE MAN WHO PRECEDED HIS VERMONT COLLEAGUE IN THE SENATE.

Summary: On June 23, 1969, Vermont Senator George Aiken, whose successor as senator, Patrick Leahy, currently serves the Green Mountain state alongside Bernard Sanders, suggested, in effect, that the United States should end its involvement in Vietnam by essentially declaring victory and pulling out. Now, half a century later, another Vermont Senator, the same Bernard Sanders, should declare "ideological victory" and pull out of the Democratic primary, conceding the race to former Vice President Joe Biden. Doing so will save Sanders much face, and, if done right, will preserve the unity the Democratic Party desperately needs to defeat the unbelievably incompetent and corrupt Donald Trump come November.

Cathedral City, March 16, 2020 — Bernard Sanders — to put it kindly — crashed and burned in last night’s Democratic debate. In an exchange where Sanders had optimistically thought that he could and would definitively and completely crush Joe Biden’s hopes of cementing the Democratic nomination, Sanders swung for the fences and never came in contact with the ball.

Now that the Democratic primary has distilled itself down to two septuagenarian white guys, last night’s Biden/Sanders debate had an awful lot of people in the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party (a wing that does not include Sanders himself, who continues to shy away from identifying himself with the party he seeks to lead) almost giddy at the prospect that Sanders could deal a potentially fatal blow to the resurgent campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden.

After a significantly morally challenged effort to depict the quondam Vice President as suffering from some kind of mental disease or defect, an effort the Sandernistas had uncritically lifted from the Trump/Kremlin playbook, eager votaries of the Sanders cult of personality made haste to spin Sunday night’s debate as one in which their candidate would mop up the floor with the battered, bruised, and bleeding remains of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr..
It was not to be. While Gospodin Sanders and his redeless, naïve followers confidently expected that Joe would make some gross, over-the-top gaffe, or deliver some line which Sanders, after the fashion of Kamala Harris in an earlier debate, could move on, Biden gave them no such opportunity.

In fact, in both presentation and affect, Biden came across as presidential, unflappable, calm, empathetic, and in command of the issues. By contrast, Sanders’s affect was histrionic, angry, dyspeptic, and about as far away from presidential as that of Donald Trump.

Joe spoke with the voice of one with command experience, the voice of a man with an extensive record in the Senate (however one cares to parse it), and above all, in a nation reeling from the pestilence of coronavirus and of the treasonably incompetent inability of the current occupant of the White House to address it, with reassurance and with the empathy of “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Isa. 53:3. In short, in affect, tone, and temper, Joe Biden was in touch with the evident purpose and concern of the nation.

Bernie, however, delivered his same stump speech, trying to bring everything around to an attack on “the millionaire and billionaire class,” and a sales pitch for “Medicare for all.” At a time when what Americans needed to hear was how a man with aspirations to the presidency of the United States propose to deal with the worst health crisis to afflict this nation since the Spanish flu of 1918 or the AIDS/HIV crisis that bade fair to decimate the queer nation in the 1980s and 1990s, Joe read the temper of the nation and spoke to it. By contrast, Bernie came across as tone deaf and out of touch. His remarks read like a Young Pioneer’s entrance essay to Komsomol.

If the Sanders movement was relying upon last night’s debate to “end” Joe Biden, they have been sorely disappointed. Indeed, in the less than a day since the debate ended, not only has the momentum swung even further Joe Biden’s way, but the consensus that it is time for Sanders to withdraw from the race is also expanding, crystallizing, and becoming more insistent.

Last week, after the Independent Vermont Senator’s disastrous performance in the super Tuesday II primaries, I suggested that the time might be at hand for Gospodin Sanders and his campaign to begin evaluating their potential way forward and beginning to think in terms of crafting an exit strategy. Certainly, the catastrophic logic of events militates powerfully against Sanders’s remaining in this campaign. Like Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Bernie should be contemplating making as graceful an exit as he possibly can. 

Sanders, in short, finds himself in the position of his Vermont Senate colleague Patrick Leahy's predecessor, George Aiken, famed for having advised his colleagues in the Senate in June, 1969, that the United States should, to all intents and purposes, declare victory in Vietnam and pull out. Last Wednesday, Sanders himself acknowledged that his campaign had won a so-called ideological victory. It may well be that Sanders himself has recognized that an "ideological victory" is the best he can hope for at this late date.

And indeed, Bernie will need, as I suggested recently, to swallow hard, stand up straight, take the midnight train over to Biden headquarters, and be prepared to choke down a helping or two of humble pie, to mend some fences, and to throw his unqualified support behind the obvious standardbearer of the Democratic Party. Of course, this will not be easy. Bernie has often tended to conflate stubbornness with “integrity.” Bernie has also tended to regard “compromise” as a terrible, existential evil. Finally, Bernie has also tended to conflate principle with a kind of narrow, priggish “revolutionary” self-righteousness.

None of these personality attributes has stood him in good stead outside the 25 to 28% of voters who still see him as some kind of messianic Savior figure. Bernie will need to acknowledge that politics is, as practitioners from Aristotle to Germany’s so-called Iron Chancellor Otto v. Bismarck-Schönhausen, to John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama have recognized, The Art of the Possible. Politics is about finding common ground, even with people you do not like. Politics is about accepting incremental, transactional victories in the service of a more transformational agenda. In politics, as Lyndon Johnson used point out, “there are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent causes.”

If Bernie Sanders can transcend the limitations of his own history and personality, if he can realize that the revolution he seeks will not be televised, and it will not be tomorrow, but incrementally its goals will be accomplished, then he may be able to do what he is going to need to do come the day after tomorrow. He is going to need to take that midnight train, choke down that humble pie, mend those fences, and make his peace with Joe Biden, freely, forthrightly, and without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.

In the Democratic primary campaign of 1960, it was no secret that Lyndon Baines Johnson, of Texas, did not particularly care for John Fitzgerald Kennedy, of Massachusetts. But the senior chieftains of the Democratic Party, those whom Bernard Sanders would have scorned as the so-called Establishment, saw the value of a Kennedy-Johnson ticket, and encouraged the two men to bury the hatchet. Lyndon initially resisted, but then, after a famous meeting with the man whom he respected as “Mr. Sam,” House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, Linden agreed to take second place on the ticket.

The rest is history. Between them, Jack Kennedy and LBJ ushered in an era of substantial advances in civil rights. America is a better place today because those two headstrong Democrats were able to make peace together and find common ground.

Now as a practical matter, the idea of a ticket composed of two septuagenarian white men from the Northeast may not make a lot of sense, particularly insofar as Joe has committed himself to naming a woman as his running mate. Nevertheless, Sanders could play a positive role as the conscience of a Biden Administration.

If, if he is willing to concede gracefully.

 -xxx-

Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is a dyspeptic Democratic attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council, and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. The opinions contained herein are his own, unless you find them congenial, in which case, they can be yours, too.