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.

PULL OUT NOW, BERNIE. WHILE THERE IS TIME.

Summary:  As the path to nomination narrows toward a vanishing point for the bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, he once again, as in 2016, seeks to blame everyone and everything outside his campaign for its failure. In short, Bernie Sanders is trying to fabricate a Doschstoßlegende to explain away his poor performance in the primaries, and to whip up the resentment of his redeless followers. If we needed any more evidence the Bernard Sanders and Donald Trump are, to all intents and purposes, brothers under the skin, we now have it. Those of us who have been bidin’ our time, waiting to see if we would have to feel the bern, now know that our initial inclination toward Joe Biden was the correct one. Clearly, Joe is on the verge of becoming the prohibitive favorite in this year’s Democratic primaries.

-------------------------
Cathedral City, March 11, 2020 –- Bernard Sanders, the bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik, took a shellacking in last night’s Super Tuesday II primaries.  The delegate numbers for Sanders were not encouraging. Joe Biden trounced him by double digits in Michigan, a state Sanders had confidently expected to win. In Mississippi, where Sanders turned his back on the African-American community, the trouncement was even more comprehensive. Biden carried the state’s Democratic primary with 81% of the vote to Sanders 14.8%.

Under the Party’s rules, Sanders’s less-than-15% finish means that he receives no delegates at all from Mississippi. Idaho, which was also expected to fall into the Sanders column instead went with Joe. Even in Washington, which as a caucus state in 2016 had delivered a massive Sanders victory, did not deliver nearly as well for the Independent Vermont Senator under its newly adopted primaries. Washington is still too close to call, but if the numbers continue to trend as they have done, Uncle Joe will come out of Washington with as many, if not more delegates than his crypto-Marxist opponent.

The Sanders campaign now stands at a less favorable position vis-à-vis Joe Biden then it stood four years ago against Hillary Clinton. After the quondam Vice President’s Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, eight days ago, the delegate math for Sanders has changed appreciably for the worse. He faces longer odds this time than he did in 2016, and he does not have Hillary Clinton to abuse.

In fact, as I observed on Facebook last night,
 

    “The path to nomination for Bernard Sanders is narrowing to endgame. Sanders has two choices:
   
    First, he can continue his war against the so-called establishment, stamping his feet and waving his arms, doing his level worst to throw the election to Trump out of spite, and encouraging his redeless followers to throw an earsplitting snit, or
   
    Second, Sanders can recognize the ineluctable logic of events and begin to make his peace with Joe Biden, and establish a unified effort to defeat Donald Trump.
   
    If Sanders takes the first option, the consequences for this country will be devastating, and the name of Bernard Sanders will become a byword for perfidy and betrayal and those who were his vociferous followers may not expect any thanks for their own betrayal.
   
    But if Sanders takes the metaphorical midnight train to Joe’s headquarters and makes his peace, and works hard to secure Joe’s election to the Presidency, then Sanders will be in a position to push for the policy choices for which he has advocated.
   
    The choice for Sanders is simple.”

Sanders’s remarks this afternoon suggest that he is preparing to take that first option, of continuing the fight, of continuing to divide the Democratic Party, and of continuing to alienate loyal Democrats who, unusually for Democrats, have decided that the salvation of the country depends upon falling in line behind Joe Biden, rather than falling in love with some other candidate.

In doing so, Sanders is continuing to live down to the stereotype of the intransigent Japanese holdout, continuing the struggle on a Pacific island long after the Shōwa Emperor’s Gyokuon-hōsō surrender order. We may expect his equally intransigent followers to launch the equivalent of banzai charges against the prohibitive favorite in a nihilistic effort to punish the American electorate for rejecting their Chosen One.

How unnecessary! How sad and utterly meaningless! Time was, in American politics of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that it was simply understood that once the primaries were over, the losing candidate and his followers would rally to the winner. As sometimes Texas agriculture Commissioner — and Bernie Sanders supporter — Jim Hightower once put it, there comes a time in every primary where the losing candidate and his/her supporters have to take what in Texas is known as the midnight train over to the headquarters of the winter. There, it’s time to mend some fences, have a helping or two of humble pie, and make sure that your name is on the volunteer list for the victorious campaign.

Even after being defeated by Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries, Hillary Clinton loyally supported Barack, notwithstanding the existence of a small, embittered movement on the fringes of the Party calling itself PUMA: Party Unity My Ass. Hillary set her face decisively against this divisive movement, and a unified Democratic Party was able to win the elections of 2008 for the first President of color in American history.

Unfortunately, we cannot expect such graciousness from either Senator Sanders or his supporters. Speaking today, Sanders made it clear that he has no intention of withdrawing from the race, presumably until the convention. We may expect at the convention, Sanders and his followers will misbehave as badly as they did at Philadelphia in 2016, with Sanders himself pouting for the cameras, and his redeless, cargo-shorts communist followers ostentatiously walking out of the convention hall and protesting in the streets of Milwaukee.
In a protest happens, my inner law-and-order disciplinarian says the police ought to be prepared to knock heads and arrest every one of the protesters, while my inner politician  says to handle the protesters gently lest we have a repeat of the chaos that attended upon the Democratic National Convention of 1968 in Chicago, which was a gross unforced error and a gift to Republican candidate Richard Nixon.

Yet, if Chicago ‘68 was a gift to Richard Nixon, every day that Bernard Sanders stays in the Democratic primary race without dropping out is a tacit endorsement of, and gift to, Donald Trump. If the primaries continue beyond March 17 in Arizona, and if Sanders insists on taking the process all the way to the convention, the Democratic Party will sustain significant damage. If a damaged Democratic Party loses this election to Donald Trump, we will have a justified Doschstoßlegende against Bernard Sanders and his followers.

If we lose in November, Sanders’s will be the face of perfidy and betrayal, and his followers will suffer the consequences both within the Democratic Party and among Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden loyalists. Even in California, you can be fired on account of your politics.

For in the end, politics is about the art of the possible. In the movie version of Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra is a scene in which Tsar Nicholas II is discussing the military situation in the Far East with his cousin, grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich, who is trying to explain to the headstrong sovereign the obstacles Russia faced trying to fight a war 8000 miles away. 

Taking a cigarette from its case and using it as a prop, Nikolai Nikolayevich brandishes it before the Tsar.

  “This is a bullet, .... I send it off to war. How does it get there? On a single spur of railroad track four thousand miles long. And in the middle, no track at all. God help us, it spends three days packed on sleds. This works the same way for every pair of boots, first aid kit, or pound of tea we send. Get out now, Nicky. While there is time.” 

Unfortunately, as history reminds us, the Emperor did not take his cousin’s advice. Determined to fight on, Nicholas led Russia into the humiliating defeat of the Russo-Japanese war. Had Nicholas heeded his cousin’s advice, or as some time Vermont (oh, the irony!) Senator George Aiken once put it, if he had “declared victory and pulled out,” a democratized Romanov Dynasty might still be on the Russian throne today. 

But Bernie, like Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, is utterly convinced of his own rectitude, ideologically incapable of compromise, convinced, as Ilyich was convinced, that all differences of opinion are irreconcilable and that anyone who differs is either suffering from a gross moral defect or some kind of physical or mental ailment.

Another bit of dialogue from the screenplay of Nicholas and Alexandra aptly encapsulates Sanders’s position, as well as the ideological defects of the so-called “democratic socialist” left:     

“Lenin thinks freedom is something you write on a wall but you do not actually practice. I do not understand you. You hate anyone who is not your kind of Bolshevik more than you hate the Tsar. No wonder why they call you Robespierre. Everybody has got to think like you are they are out!”

In short, Bernard Sanders, whose ancestry links him ineluctably with the Russian Empire, has managed to combine in his own proper person the stubbornness of Nicholas Romanov and the ideological inflexibility of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Needless to say, this is a thoroughly bad – nay, disqualifying-- combination for someone who wants to be president of the United States. 

The time has come.

Pull out now, Bernie. While there is time.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is a dyspeptic, but loyal, Democrat. He 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 views expressed herein are his own.

LITTLE SNAPPERS FOR MARCH 7, 2020: The Immoral Sanders Repetition of Trumpian tropes and the Galactic Screwup in Los Angeles County Voting

Summary: As happened in 2016, so-called hardline supporters of Independent Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders have been uncritically and unquestioningly availing themselves of the Trump campaign narratives against Bernard Sanders political rival Joe Biden. Their favorite Trumpian trope is that Vice President Biden, who suffered from an appalling stammer/stutter as a child, is somehow losing his marbles. Coming as it does the supporters of one verbally challenged septuagenarian from Queens and easily and uncritically repeated by the followers of another septuagenarian with a Brooklyn accent so thick you can cut it with a knife, such allegations are risible at best and more than a little bit contemptible.

Los Angeles County registrar of voters Dean Logan ought to be fired. The abysmal pig’s breakfast that Los Angeles County inflicted upon us voters by eliminating neighborhood precincts in favor of so-called boating centers goes a long way toward demonstrating that not only are the old ways frequently the best ways, but that the worst possible time for trying to roll out new voting technologies is in the midst of one of the most consequential primaries in recent California history. A pilot project in, say, West Hollywood or Beverly Hills, would have exposed the glitches and not left nearly so many people as were disenfranchised cut off from the vote. Logan should not only be fired, but his metaphorical head should be stuck up on a pike outside the county Hall of Administration.

---------------------------------
The Berniebros, or as Vice President Biden referred to them more politely, and with a certain delicious snark, the Bernie Brothers, have once again demonstrated that the entire Sanders campaign is either woefully tone deaf or a willing fifth column for Donald Trump.
 
As the campaign has ramped up, Donald Trump has increasingly been trying to horn in on the Democratic primaries with a view to poisoning the well against the Democratic candidate he fears most, Joe Biden.
 
Not satisfied with earning himself an impeachment, even if he was acquitted by Republican senators in a rigged procedure that will live in infamy, Trump and his redeless, Russophile followers have begun to disseminate a probably Kremlin-originated bit of disinformation that Joe Biden is suffering from a cognitive decline. Put in simple, non-Vulcan English, the Trump types are claiming that Joe Biden is losing his marbles. 

Of course, the Trumpist attack, based as it is on Vice President Biden’s acknowledged childhood stammer/stutter is directly akin to Donald Trump’s disgusting November 25, 2015 attack on the New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, in which Trump mocked Kovaleski for the reporter’s arthrogryposis, a congenital joint condition. Of course, we cannot expect anything better from Trump than a revolting attack on someone’s disability.

On the other hand, we can, and should, expect a great deal better from any Democratic candidate and that candidate’s supporters. Yet, both the Independent Vermont senator and his supporters have uncritically repeated the unverified, Kremlin-originated claim that Vice President Biden is on the brink of, or actually suffering from, dementia.

This weaponization of Vice President Biden’s childhood speech impediment (and particularly from one Bridge and Tunnel Outer Boroughs septuagenarian from Queens whose vocabulary includes such clunkers as “covfefe” and “hamberders” and another Bridge and Tunnel Outer Boroughs septuagenarian whose woefully uncorrected Brooklyn accent leaves him unable to pronounce the initial H in words like huge or humanitarian) is not only insulting to people who have experience with stuttering, it is also a slap in the face to every American who may be suffering from any disability at all. As a southpaw child, I grappled with a mild form of stuttering. When I injured my left hand during a workout four years ago, and had to try to write with my right hand, my brief experience as a compulsory Northpaw caused that stutter to come roaring back. All this, despite having a faculty for language that produced a 780 verbal (out of 800) on my SAT. Thus, I don’t take attacks on stuttering or stutterers terribly kindly.

Perhaps this explains why I have nothing but disdain for the sour, superannuated shtetl Stalinist, the mendacious misogynist, the loudmouthed Leninist loser, the blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders and his supporters. Their willingness to weaponize Vice President Biden’s history of childhood stuttering against him is a slur upon decency, upon morality, upon how we are called on as human beings to treat one another.

Add to their moral failings on that issue, the manifest misogynistic disdain expressed by the senator and his supporters for Massachusetts Senator and former presidential candidate Warren, to say nothing of the nastiness expressed by the Burlington Bolshevik and his supporters for Hillary Clinton four years ago, and it becomes clear that there is absolutely no moral case for supporting Bernard Sanders. We neither need nor want some kind of ersatz October Revolution led by an angry synthetic Leninist and his legions of wannabe Komsomoltsy.

                                                   * * * * *

Of course, while Gospodin Sanders and his redeless, cargo-shorts-communist krewe are eagerly trafficking in Trumpian tropes against the Democratic front runner, they did manage to sell a hell of a lot of Californians a bill of goods. However, in Los Angeles County, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of voters may have been turned away from the polling places in frustration at the gross, possibly criminal, incompetence of Los Angeles County registrar recorder, Dean Logan, and his bureaucrats.

In a misguided effort to “facilitate voting,” Los Angeles County abolished most of its neighborhood voting precincts. No longer could you walk down the block to a polling place in your neighborhood, staffed by your neighbors, and engage in the friendly neighborhood social interactions most of us who were brought up in Los Angeles County associated with voting. By way of example, I cast my 1992 general election vote for Bill Clinton in the parish hall of St. Ambrose church in West Hollywood, a block and a half from where I lived. It was a five-minute walk to my precinct. Now, under Dean Logan’s plan, one has to go to a so-called voting center, often a considerable distance from where one had been accustomed to vote, and there one had to interact with bureaucrats whom one did not know, and attempt to work with technology with which one was not familiar.

Naturally, this so-called “innovation” led to the same kind of pig’s breakfast that prevailed in Palm Beach County, Florida in the general election of 2000, and which enabled George Dubya Bush to steal the election from Al Gore. While the voting in Los Angeles County was not marred by butterfly ballots, which when offered to a heavily retirement age electorate caused frequent cases of what commentators soon christened “electile dysfunction,” it was still marred by hours long lines at polling places, difficult-to-work technology, and frustration levels that caused a lot of people to conclude that they should simply walk away without having exercised their franchise.

The cockup in Los Angeles County was voter suppression made all the worse because it had been occasioned not by some kind of deliberate effort to suppress the vote, but by the arrogance of unelected bureaucrats operating with the kind of mentality that has become all too typical of the Democratic Party: just supply people with the raw data and they will spontaneously perform the appropriate analysis and derive the correct conclusion.

Dean Logan, having made the decision to roll out the new “voting center” plan, and its unproven technology, ought to be fired and unceremoniously marched out of his workplace, preferably in handcuffs, doing a perp walk. At the very least, the new system should have been beta tested in small voting jurisdictions such as West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, San Fernando, or Santa Monica, where any glitches could have been found and corrected. More to the point, Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra ought to be looking into Mr. Logan with a view to prosecuting him for having interfered with the voting rights of hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of Los Angeles County residents and Angeleños who may have been deterred from exercising their franchise in this most consequential primary election in recent California history. What happened in Los Angeles County was simply unforgivable.  Dean Logan's metaphorical head should be on a pike outside the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration. 

In fact, what happened in Los Angeles County merits Legislative intervention to ensure that the new system of so-called voting centers is scrapped or beta tested before being foisted on a county with millions of voters. Los Angeles County needs to return posthaste to neighborhood precincts, where voting can be participated in and understood as an activity to be undertaken with one’s neighbors in a fashion that reinforces extensive democracy, not top-down bureaucracy.
Fire Dean Logan. Abolish voting centers. Restore neighborhood voting.

                                                     -xxx-

Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council, and who practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. Additionally, he served for a dozen years, on or off, as a member of the Riverside County Democratic Central Committee. The views set forth herein are his own, unless you find them congenial, in which case, they can be yours, too.

As used occasionally in this blog, the term “Little Snappers” is a borrowing from the late Chief Justice Warren Burger, who used to let off steam by penning brief concurrences or dissents, usually unpublished, which he called “Little Snappers.” Berger regarded them as devices for maintaining sanity.

ELIZABETH WARREN: A NUANCED APPRECIATION

Summary: Elizabeth Warren has withdrawn for the Democratic contest for her Party’s nomination for President of the United States. Her parting is bittersweet, helping clear the field for a binary contest between the pragmatic Joe Biden and the doctrinaire Bernard Sanders. Liz was on the left edge of the field, but she was a happy warrior, unafraid and persistent. Had Joe Biden not been in the race, she would have been my choice, and, I expect, the choice of millions of other voters as well.

“I’ve got a plan for that.”

                -Sen. Elizabeth Warren

“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

                -Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell

“Curious that the Emperor of half the world should be defied by a woman who is Queen of half an island.”

                -Pope Sixtus V, expressing exasperation about the quarrel between King Philip II of Spain and Queen Elizabeth I of England, after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588

“The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment.”

                -Centauri Emperor Turhan, Babylon 5, “The Coming of Shadows”



Cathedral City, March 5, 2020 --Elizabeth Warren withdrew from the presidential race today. Her parting leaves that lolo wahine Tulsi Gabbard (she’s NAILZ!) and two white, septuagenarian men battling it out for the Democratic nomination. Putting Ms. Gabbard aside, for she has not got the slightest chance of clinching the nomination, the Democratic primary winnowing process has produced a stark choice between Joe Biden, a candidate who wants to restore the soul of America, and Bernard Sanders, an ideological, doctrinaire “revolutionary” who wants to bern it all down.

After Super Tuesday, when Joe Biden experienced his own personal Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, roaring back from what everyone thought would be the end of his campaign to retake leadership in the contest, a comeback in which Joe pwned Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, flaming the Burlington Bolshevik to a well done crisp, other Democratic candidates began to see the handwriting on the wall.

Already, prior to Super Tuesday, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg had ended their campaigns and thrown their support behind Vice President Biden. The day after Super Tuesday, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg did the same, and it was said at that time that Elizabeth Warren and her senior campaign staff were evaluating her “way forward.” Translated, that meant that the Massachusetts Senator, who had dramatically underperformed in her efforts to seek the Democratic nomination, was considering an exit strategy.

Though, full disclosure, I have been a steadfast supporter of the quondam vice president since he announced early last year, Elizabeth Warren would have been an equally acceptable choice had Joe not been a part of the field. Her cheerful bearing, her confident affect, her upbeat assurances that “I’ve got a plan for that,” all suggested that here was a candidate who had some intellectual rigor, who had well thought out policy positions that were at significant variance from those of the other candidate on the left side of the field, the bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders.

I have to admit having been somewhat disappointed at her sharp elbowed “wine cave” attack on Pete Buttigieg. I was disappointed not because I felt the attack was an appropriate, but because it seemed so out of character for the Elizabeth Warren so many of us had come to know, for the Elizabeth Warren so many of us were prepared to embrace as a president should fate smile upon her and show her to the White House. I think many of us were disappointed because we saw in that unfortunate “wine cave” attack not only a sign of early worry about the viability of her campaign, but also of a disturbing willingness to adopt the tactics of Bernard Sanders.

Now Bernard Sanders is nothing if not a documented misogynist. From a creepy rate-fantasy essay in 1972 to his insistence just last year to Elizabeth Warren, by the way, that a woman could not be elected President, with its implication that woman should not be elected President, the sad Sanders record of misogyny is plain for the entire body politic to see and to draw conclusions about.

Doubtless, champagne corks are popping in Burlington today now that Sanders’s last rival on the far left in the Democratic Party is out of the race. No doubt the prickly Vermont Senator and his acolytes will be drawing from Warren’s withdrawal whatever minute pearl of consolation they can find from the very rough oyster of the shellacking they took on Super Tuesday. Unfortunately, they will also draw the conclusion that their ugly, slash-and-bern style of campaigning is working.

Of course, this is absolutely the wrong conclusion to have drawn. The conclusion that the Sandernistas ought to have drawn delete from Super Tuesday is that the confrontational, condescending, pugilistic, pugnacious, in-your-face, my-way-or-the-highway style of campaigning of which Bernie Sanders and his redeless, cargo-shorts-communist, followers are so enamored has created for them a substantial reservoir of ill will, dislike, and disdain which has redounded to the benefit of Joseph R. Biden, Jr..

As Sanders finds his path to the nomination of a party of which he is not a member narrowing as he himself is more thoroughly vetted by Democratic partisans, we may expect his campaign to begin decompensating in real time. In psychology, decompensation “refers to the inability to maintain defense mechanisms in response to stress, resulting in personality disturbance or psychological imbalance. Some who suffer from narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder may decompensate into persecutory delusions to defend against a troubling reality.” (Wikipedia)

Sanders’s interview yesterday evening with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow demonstrated how quickly and how badly the Vermont Senator is decompensating. What we expect on a regular basis from Donald Trump we are now witnessing on an equally regular basis from Bernard Sanders.

Sanders has prided himself on being an irascible curmudgeon, and an awful lot of people have latched on to his irascible curmudgeonliness as if he were some kind of lovable, if difficult, uncle or grandfather. Others see Senator Sanders as not the lovable curmudgeon, but as the crazy uncle who crashes the family Thanksgiving after having been specifically disinvited. But, what is known about the Independent senator is that he is in fact a doctrinaire ideologue whose ability, and that of his acolytes, to tolerate differing views is every bit as limited as Donald Trump’s.

Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, always came across as a fighter, but never as a bully. Her ability to yield with grace when confronted by bullies on the Senate floor earned her a great moral victory over Mitch McConnell. His exasperated attempt to put this uppity woman in her place, expressed in his ill considered statement “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” may very well have helped start the Aotsunami, the blue Tidal Wave of Democratic victories of 2018. 

Elizabeth Warren met Mitch McConnell with the calm defiance with which Elizabeth Tudor met Philip v. Habsburg, Philip II of Spain. And as the Massachusetts Senator stood up to the Grim Reaper, there were echoes of the annoyance with which Pope Sixtus V demanded to know how “the Emperor of half the world should be defied by a woman who is Queen of half an island.” 

As Elizabeth Warren leaves the campaign, to return to the Senate, where she can be warned, where she can have explanations proffered to her, and, most importantly, where she can persist, the far left of the Democratic Party finds itself pinning its hopes on a man who, as Republican strategist Karl Rove observed in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, bears a disturbing resemblance to Henry Wallace, the vice president whom Franklin Roosevelt dropped in 1944 in favor of Harry S. Truman. Wallace ran for President in 1948 and came away with all of 2 1/2% of the vote.

As Winston Churchill wrote in The World Crisis, “the terrible ifs accumulate. If Elizabeth Warren had been able to make a go of her presidential campaign. If after having been beaten by nearly 4 million votes in the 2016 primary, Bernard Sanders had been purged from the Democratic Party. If, if, if.

Babylon 5's J. Michael Straczynski, who wrote some of the best teleplays of the 1990s, expressed the difficulty of our national condition in a line from the Babylon 5 episode “The Coming of Shadows:” “The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment.” 

We find ourselves lost in a terrible in between. We are in danger of losing the America in which we have all been raised, and which in our own ways, we all cherish. All of us understand that there is still time to seize that “one last fragile moment,” to reclaim all that is good, and true, and noble about what Abraham Lincoln once called this “last, best hope of earth.” But we dare not choose either Donald Trump’s authoritarian, crypto-Nazi authoritarianism or the doctrinaire Marxist my-way-or-the-highway, Fidel Castro-adulating approach offered to us by Bernard Sanders. Liz understood that. Joe understands that.

In the binary choice that follows, in which the past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us, Joe Biden has emerged as the man to seize that one last fragile moment. Hopefully his cabinet, if God vouchsafes him this election, will be composed of the superabundantly talented men and women, from every race and nation, every rank and station, every gender and orientation, who made up the most diverse field of Democratic contenders ever to seek the Presidency of the United States.

                                                                                 -xxx-

Paul S. Marchand 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 views expressed herein are his own.