Super Tuesday: Democrats duke it out over Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden
The Democrats may have thrown Joe Biden a lifeline, but it’s the socialist Bernie Sanders who stands a fighting chance of actually toppling Donald Trump come November, writes James Morrow.
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Super Tuesday may be done and dusted, but for the Democrats, the way forward is no clearer.
The problem for America’s Democrats is that whether they decide to go with Weekend at Bernie’s or Weekend at Biden’s, they are still left propping up a metaphorical corpse.
But with today’s results, three things become apparent.
One, even many Democrats seem spooked by Bernie Sanders’ socialist line and would prefer to see even the doddering, gaffe-prone Joe Biden go up against Trump.
Two, the heavy lift undertaken by party brass (and their allies in much of the US media) to boost Biden, including getting rivals Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to drop out and stop splitting the field, appears to have paid off – for now.
And three – and this may be the best news of all – the American presidency is not for sale to the highest bidder.
Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire ex-New York City mayor who’d tipped hundreds of millions of dollars into winning the democratic nomination, had a disastrous night, failing to crack even the 15 per cent mark necessary to pick up convention delegates in a number of key states like Virginia.
One can only imagine the diamond-crusted staplers and platinum hole-punches being flung in the direction of top staffers’ noggins.
But while Biden made a huge comeback after being all but counted out, with Texas close and California falling to Sanders, it is clear that Democrat voters haven’t entirely fallen in line with the party leadership.
If, after California and Texas, Sanders’ supporters are left with enough hope – and delegates – to cling to, we may still see a “brokered” convention to choose the nominee.
So far, while the final results out of California may not be known until the end of the week due to their system for postal ballots, Biden looks to lead by only fifty or so of the 1,991 delegates required.
And a close win for Biden at the convention will only further embitter Sanders supporters, who not without cause believe the party has tilted the playing field against their candidate.
In both 2016 and 2020, shenanigans at the Iowa caucus were blamed for denying Sanders his due victory and early momentum, and you can count on his revolutionary supporters not to forget these slights. In one poll, only 53 per cent of Sanders supporters said they would support the Democratic nominee, whomever it is. Nearly 90 per cent of Biden supporters made the same pledge.
To put it another way, if Sanders is denied, the cult of Bernie will take it out on Biden in November.
But if Sanders’ radical economics and infamous apologies for Castro’s Cuba are almost sure to be steamrolled by Trump, Biden will still have to convince Americans he can provide a better deal.
In what could be a replay of Australia’s 2019 election, a moderate-left candidate will be faced with the job of convincing industrial and resource sector workers that he won’t sacrifice their jobs on the altars of globalisation and the environment and tell them to “learn to code”.
And then there is the fact that Biden, for all his loveable uncle routine, is a walking miscue whose every campaign appearance adds to suggestions that he may be in the early stages of cognitive decline. Biden himself has suggested that if he won, he’d only serve one term, making him a lame duck from the moment he took the oath.
These concerns are real.
In recent days he has claimed that 150 million Americans – half the country – had been killed in gun violence, told a crowd he was running for US Senate, and said that if voters didn’t like him they were free to vote for “the other Biden”.
Come again?
But here is the great irony: Biden may be the centrist and Sanders the proto-Marxist, but it is the perpetual also-ran candidate Biden whose 2020 campaign is best summarised by Lenin’s old saying, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
If so, there’s a lot of decades left before November.