The only candidate with a believable path to beating President Trump in the Electoral College finally proved he still has the cajones and the coherence to campaign against him in a general election. He also claimed that domestic gun deaths since 2007 have killed 150 million people and responded to a debate prompt asking him about his personal motto with a promise to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court.
Luckily for Joe Biden, he found his stones at the very last second that it mattered. His eminently weird final minutes of the debate aside, it still seems possible that he ekes out the significant victory in South Carolina he needs to survive Super Tuesday. But if we stop grading on an extremely generous curve and consider the impact of Tuesday’s debate on Election Day, it is impossible to deny that, yet again, the single biggest victor by a landslide of a Democratic presidential debate is Trump.
Consider: Biden earns plaudits because he may have saved his candidacy (for now) by the skin of his teeth, and in large part, that happened because the socialist front-runner happened to melt down in spectacular fashion, turning red-faced as he refused to admit he’s a commie bootlicker and wearing every day of his 78 years on his growling jowls.
Bernie Sanders promised that he wasn’t a “friend” of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Too bad this came just one night after he praised the Chinese Communist Party for pulling millions out of poverty (when, in fact, it was Western-enabled capitalist reforms that did so), and during the same debate, he reserved harsher words for Israeli democracy. When he tried to waffle on his previous (read: decadeslong) sycophancy toward Fidel Castro’s Cuba, it took Pete Buttigieg to hold him to account. Yes, it was the 38-year-old former mayor of the 308th largest city in the nation that finally made the 78-year-old senator look like the petulant child he is.
Too bad the centrist lane is being bulldozed by the evil billionaire. Michael Bloomberg let his own Sinophilia out on full display tonight, refusing to even concede that Xi, who hasn’t so much as staged a sham election, is a dictator. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren whined about nondisclosure agreements, the other billionaire bloviated — something, if anyone can remember — and the only candidate other than Biden with a shot of winning Michigan and Florida pretended that it was business as usual as the rest of the stage melted down in spectacular fashion.
If you’re Sanders, perhaps you feel downcast that Biden will likely live to see another day. If you’re Trump, you can rest easy, knowing that in a general election, Sanders as a nominee cannot hide an iota of his identity under pressure: old, angry, and most importantly to the president, weak.
