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.
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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.
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