Will Biden emerge?

What Democrats have needed is a two-person race with Bernie Sanders against … anybody, really.

Now it appears Joe Biden might emerge tomorrow as that anybody. If he doesn’t, the Democrats will likely proceed with a muddled field accruing to Sanders’ benefit, with multiple moderates splitting votes against one semi-socialist. And it likely would be Michael Bloomberg’s fault.

Biden once was somebody. He was a U.S. senator, the vice president and the preconceived front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. He was the lone Democrat who might appeal to working-class voters in the upper Midwest who rejected Hillary Clinton and foisted on us the bloviating despot.

Then the white liberals of Iowa and New Hampshire got a close look at Biden and didn’t see much. He’s more gregarious in the short term than impressive in the long. They vanquished him to fourth and fifth place while Sanders, the unelectable democratic socialist independent, soared to first place with modest pluralities.

That’s considerably less than Sanders had regularly garnered four years before as the sole challenger to Clinton. But, this time, Sanders’ 26 percent in New Hampshire and Iowa—and 46 percent in Nevada—cumulatively amounted to more than any of the moderate or center-left candidates could muster amid Biden’s collapse.

The problem wasn’t Sanders’ soaring popularity. It was the alternatives’ co-equal weakness.

But then, on Saturday, the Democratic primary voters of South Carolina—nearly three-fifths African American—turned Biden back into somebody, or at least made him the likeliest prospect to fill the role of designated anybody.

They liked him because he had been Barack Obama’s No. 2. They liked him because their leader, U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, vouched for him.

They liked him because they liked him.

They delivered a victory rout to Biden, sending him into today’s orgy of 14 Super Tuesday state primaries with some measure of momentum. All he needs today is to win three or four states and finish second in most of the others.

Sanders will be in a solid delegate lead Wednesday morning, owing to California, most likely. Biden’s objective is to emerge as the clear leader of the rest of the field, and thus the candidate who’ll stop Sanders one-onone from there on out.

“I’m ridin’ with Biden,” a Democratic friend texted Sunday. “Yep,” said another.

But Biden’s catapult could be limited today for two reasons. One is that much early voting had taken place prior to Saturday in today’s states. The other is that you have to figure, now that Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar have reasonably and graciously withdrawn, Biden can outdo Elizabeth Warren, but confronts with some uncertainty a new name on the ballot, Bloomberg.

The point of Bloomberg’s late Super Tuesday entry was to fill the vacuum of Biden’s collapse. It was a better plan before Saturday.

Whatever Bloomberg gets today will come from Biden, mostly. He might have been helped a little by a favorable 60 Minutes segment Sunday evening.

Consider our little 31 delegates in Arkansas, where the black vote might be 20 percent of today’s Democratic primary.

The black vote could lift Biden to a modest plurality in Arkansas, though something approximating a multiple tie seems equally possible.

The two polls I’ve seen, one by Talk Business and Hendrix College with a credible sample and the other without, have had Sanders, Biden, Bloomberg and Buttigieg jammed between 15 and 20 percent.

In fact, among white liberal voters in my Little Rock neighborhood who almost always vote alike, my recent interactions have produced this thoroughly fractured dynamic: The environmentally conscious fellow across the way told me he voted for Bloomberg because of his financial support of climate change initiatives; a closer neighbor went door-to-door for Warren; the folks up the way had a hot-dish dinner for Klobuchar; someone else simply found Buttigieg’s intelligence and articulation compelling, and a few of us ever-practical old rascals waited until Saturday night to behold that Biden had emerged as our designated hitter against Trump.

If Biden doesn’t lead Arkansas, the chance would seem to exist that Arkansas might be a state Bloomberg could win. He’s been in the state over the last month almost as often as Hillary Clinton has been in it this century.

Credit where due: Conservative radio host Bill Vickery, welcoming me as a guest Sunday morning, quipped that Bloomberg should have skipped the advertising orgy and skimmed loose change off his vast fortune to pay off the coaching contracts of Bret Bielema and Chad Morris.

The best analysis I’ve heard about Bloomberg came from former candidate Andrew Yang. He said Bloomberg’s spending big money to beat Trump and running himself was like a movie director casting himself as the lead.

Clint Eastwood just wouldn’t have been right as the American Sniper.