The joke in Rome is that if you enter the conclave as a (likely) pope, you will leave it as a cardinal — i.e., not as the new pope. Something similar just happened in the Democratic race for president.
Just like that, within the space of about 10 days, Sen. Bernie Sanders went from presumptive nominee to that old guy Larry David imitates, who ran twice and never quite pulled off his revolution. The polling chart featured on the Decision Desk HQ Livecast ahead of this week’s elections was quite striking:
I was expecting Sanders’s 1 p.m. press conference today to be an announcement that he was quitting the race. It didn’t prove to be so, but he might as well have. His moment has passed.
Sanders’s loss in little, old Idaho, of all places, most clearly demonstrates it. You knew Biden was going to win Michigan, Missouri, and Mississippi by wide margins, as he did. But in 2016, Sanders had taken 78% in the Idaho caucuses. This time, Idaho Democrats opted for a primary, and the state’s very left-wing Democratic electorate (Boise’s North End is basically a well-armed version of the Takoma neighborhood in far north Washington, D.C.) settled for Old Joe.
Biden had proven a big disappointment in the early states. Most people, myself included, figured that if anyone could stop Sanders, it would have to be someone besides the former vice president. But no one else was rising to the challenge — least of all Michael Bloomberg, the greatest of all fools parted from his money.
As soon as it became a question of keeping their party’s nomination away from Fidel Castro and his beard, Democratic voters silently and suddenly recognized the gravity of the situation. Beginning with the predominantly black voters of South Carolina, they fell in line, as if someone had choreographed the whole thing in advance.
This only came as a surprise because a left-wing media echo chamber has gone to such lengths to mainstream Sanders’s politics. They were all ready to make the excuses they would have had to make. We were going to be lectured about how this socialism was “democratic” — never mind that “democratic” socialism, by its own definitions, is really about “democratizing” people’s private bank accounts, not their government.
This result, a catastrophe for progressivism in general, should convince everyone just how harmful and misleading the left-wing media echo chamber has been to the political Left. It’s not that they were just too out of touch with “deplorable” America to see Trump’s presidency coming. They’re out of touch even with the typical Democratic primary voter.
Coastal liberals had convinced themselves, and a lot of us, too, since we ought to defer to their expertise about their party, that the future of the Democrats would be the woke, social-justice-oriented and socialistic claptrap into which Twitter has lately devolved. They have proven to be the last people in the room to figure out that Twitter isn’t real life. The way forward for Democratic candidates this year, and probably in future years, was not to promise abortion access for biological males or “democratization” of private property and private healthcare plans, or extreme climate alarmism that says the world will end in a few years’ time.
In short, the winner will end up being the old white guy with the best name recognition who made the least ridiculous appeal to rational people from a traditional liberal Democratic perspective.
And if you ask me, the second most credible candidate, who probably could have become president under different circumstances, was Amy Klobuchar. After these last two weeks of Democratic nominating contests, I won’t be surprised for even one second if Biden spurns the far Left completely and chooses her as his vice president.
They are paper tigers, Joe. Discard them.
