Summary: As the 2020 Democratic presidential primary season cranks its way into the repetitive foreplay of the 2019 pre–primary season, poll numbers for Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are looking progressively less promising (all puns fully intended) then they had earlier this spring. On the other hand, Joe Biden’s poll numbers have quickly established him as the prohibitive favorite; at this stage, despite the fulminations of Sanders and his redeless followers, the primary is very much Joe Biden’s to lose.
What Biden brings to the fight, that Sanders has never been able to muster, is the sheer insurgent joy of a well thought fight. In short, Biden brings a kind of Cavalier joie de vivre that Sanders, the Cromwellian Roundhead, is entirely incapable of mustering. To the extent that joy cometh in the morning (Ps, 30:5), Biden still has the advantage.
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Frankly, it’s hard to tell whether the Democratic 2020 presidential primary, which is now underway much too far in advance, has started to resemble a pilgrimage, a gladiatorial contest, or an orgy.
The backbiting, the dirty tricks, the hit pieces, and the sheer nastiness of the primary season all put us in mind of the Democratic primary season of 2016. The Democrats, like the Bourbons of the ancien régime in France, have lived down to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord’s mordant witticism that “Ils n'ont rien appris, ni rien oublié,” they have learned nothing and they have forgotten nothing.
In the learned nothing and forgotten nothing department may be found particularly Bernard Sanders and his redeless, pugnacious, always-ready-for-a-fight online followers, the so-called Berniebros whose penchant for attacking other candidates or other social media commenters soon became common fodder for watercooler discussions among the American left. Joan Walsh, writing in The Nation, asserted in May, 2016, that “Bernie Sanders is Hurting Himself by Playing the Victim.”; the same month, Harold Meyerson, writing in The American Prospect, warned about “How the Bros Are Undermining Bernie.”
Three years on, the Bros seem to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Neither has Sen. Sanders. Just recently, this February, in fact, the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman, making “The Case Against Bernie Sanders” observed, as numerous other commentators had done, that the Vermont Senator’s “humorless dogmatism” was undermining his campaign.
If many Democrats fear that Joe Biden is “too old,” or too gaffe-prone to be president, they overlook the fact that Biden is nevertheless noticeably happy in this battle. There is an insurgent, effervescent joy that Joe Biden has brought to this campaign that Bernard Sanders seems utterly incapable of mustering.
Recently, a Biden-supporting queer friend of mine suggested that Joe was rather like the William Hurt character in Kiss of the Spider Woman, playing opposite Raul Julia in the classic scene in which Hurt’s character, imprisoned for being queer, offers Julia’s character, the imprisoned revolutionary, a morsel of avocado. Raul Julia’s character rejects the proffered avocado with the observation that “what life offers... is the struggle.”
In many ways, the difference between the effervescent Joe Biden and the humorless, dogmatic Bernard Sanders can be perfectly summed up by the exchange between the two characters in that scene in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Put another way, harking back to mid-17th century England, the Biden effort comes across with much more a Cavalier sensibility, effervescent, possessed of a sense of joie de vivre, and above all, capable of smiling, laughing, and shrugging off the occasional gaffe.
By contrast, Bernard Sanders, together with his followers, his proverbial Bros, really does come across as grim, prim, dour, sour, doctrinaire, dogmatic, pious, self-righteous, and, da capo al fine, utterly humorless. The entire Sanders campaign has been framed like some kind of Leninist exercise by which aspirants for admission to Komsomol were assigned to write essays on the evils of capitalism and the inevitable triumph of Marxism-Leninism. The whole Sanders effort, in short, resembles nothing so much as an attempted Soviet Mosfilm cover of Ninochka, the 1939 MGM film starring the unforgettable Greta Garbo as a no-nonsense Soviet diplomat.
Mosfilm would have made a pig’s breakfast of Ninochka. Comedy did not go over particularly well in Stalin's Soviet Union.
But even worse, the Sanders effort has come to resemble that of Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads, determined to impose upon the United States the same kind of pious, self-righteous, priggish regime that Old Noll, his Roundheads, and his Major Generals imposed upon Great Britain and Ireland from the execution of King Charles I 1649 until the triumphant return of King Charles II in 1660.
Yet, America neither needs nor desires, nor will it accept, a political dispensation where joy is banished and where it’s Lent in America. Jimmy Carter, an otherwise thoroughly decent and honorable man, learned this lesson to his great political sorrow in 1980. During the Carter years, there was a Lenten sensibility in America. One small example will suffice to make the case: in 1977, under pressure from the Carter Administration, American auto manufacturers ceased production of convertibles because they were ostensibly unsafe.
In less than three months after the administration's ukaz, a thriving after market had sprung up to convert hard tops into convertibles. European manufacturers continued to produce convertibles, most notably the MGB, the swan song of Morris Garages of Abington, Oxfordshire. American consumers were not happy at being stripped of their choice to buy convertibles by what they perceived as a hypertrophied, schoolmarmish government bureaucracy determined to deprive them of all their joie de vivre.
Similarly, in the 1961 mayoral campaign in the city of Los Angeles, under then-Republican incumbent Mayor Norris Poulson, homeowners throughout the city were required to segregate their garbage, much as California homeowners are required to segregate their garbage today. The trash segregation policy proved unpopular, and Poulson was challenged for the mayoralty of Los Angeles by former Democratic Congressman Sam Yorty. Among the planks in Yorty’s platform was an abolition of the garbage segregation requirement. Resentful San Fernando Valley residents put Yorty over the top, knocking Norrie Polson out of office. When Yorty was elected, it was said by Angeleño political wags that Sam Yorty had been swept into office on a wave of garbage.
While it may actually have been a bit much to say that Sam Yorty was really swept into office on a wave of garbage, and equally a reach to suggest that Ronald Reagan was swept into office in a convertible with the top down, it would nevertheless not be too far off the mark to suggest that the Carter administration’s pressure on the then big four automakers to discontinue convertible manufacture, added to the administration’s less than adroit handling of the Iran hostage crisis, may have played a part in Reagan’s victory in 1980,
Suffice it to say, however, that Ronald Reagan understood the temper of America in the early 1980s. His “it’s morning in America” campaign was nothing short of brilliant. It beat Fritz Mondale’s Carter administration redux messaging all to hell. Unfortunately, Bernie Sanders seems to have bought, hook line and sinker, into the Carter/Mondale “it’s Lent in America” messaging. After all, joy cometh in the morning. Ps. 30:5
It may very well be that Joe Biden’s sunny, effervescent, youthful approach to his campaign is part of the reason why Sanders seems to be slipping in the polls. The American public wants a happy warrior; not a hectoring scold.
As long as Bernie Sanders continues to act the part of the superannuated shtetl Stalinist scold, the loudmouth Leninist, the bloviating bourgeois Bolshevik, the man devoid of a sense of humor who sparks no joy, he can expect to be trounced in the primaries, particularly among the women of color who, as I’ll discuss in my next post, will be so enormously consequential in the Democratic primaries of 2020.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is an attorney, former City Councilman, and Democratic loudmouth who lives in Cathedral city and practices law in the adjacent jurisdiction of Rancho Mirage (where they only have white chocolate). He appreciates, from personal experience, how important women of color are in the political life of the Democratic Party. The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of the Democratic Party.
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