Biden back in the game
The powerful question entering Super Tuesday was whether Joe Biden could turn one Saturday night of love in South Carolina into real and verifiable momentum.
Three days after his rise from demise in South Carolina, the answer was rather resoundingly yes.
He won big and early in Virginia, North Carolina and Alabama. Then he added Tennessee and Oklahoma, and, yes, Arkansas. He was a credible second in Texas.
It was a solid South for this most moderate and conventional Democrat. But Biden was remarkably in the game in New England as well. He may have won Minnesota and Massachusetts.
He was dominating among blacks and seniors—the heart and backbone of the Democratic constituency—as well as among persons who wanted above all else to beat Donald Trump and, of course, among those who decided at the least minute.
That’s a winning coalition going forward, if Biden is not too far behind in the delegate count after California lavishes its early voting bounty on Bernie Sanders.
Sanders’ highly likely big California win would come later Tuesday evening, and be buoyed by that massive early voting before Biden’s Saturday night of revival. But the broader point was that, either way, Sanders would emerge to confront a single rival of coalesced backing.
And that’s just what non-extreme Democrats needed if they were to stand a chance of stopping the semi-socialist on the assumption that he couldn’t win the presidency and would drag down Democratic congressional hopefuls in swing states.
The Biden comeback story was a genuine drama and a remarkably refreshing modern political narrative. It arose solely from two days of unpaid media—we once called that news coverage—driven in part by endorsements from two of his former rivals to offer the lone alternative to Sanders, meaning Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.
Biden had no time between Saturday night’s transformative win in South Carolina and Super Tuesday to make new commercials or buy new time or open new field offices, even with money that had started coming in since Saturday.
He was brought from the dead over 48 hours of news reports that filled time between Mike Bloomberg commercials.
Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden in South Carolina seemed clearly to have been the single event that changed the race. The vaunted “Democratic establishment” wasn’t remotely credit-worthy. That “establishment” seemed simply to be falling in from the sidewalk to join the Joe Parade started and led by Clyburn and black voters in South Carolina.
Bloomberg’s limitless money was putting him marginally in Biden’s way. He was taking enough votes for third place, and sometimes second, and to garner a few delegates. But those votes were useful mostly to keep Biden from doing even better.
The multibillionaire former mayor of New York City made a credible bet that Biden would fail as the presumptive non-Sanders in the race. It was a fine bet until along came Clyburn, then black voters in South Carolina, then Buttigieg, then Klobuchar, then Beto O’Rourke, then Virginia, then North Carolina, then Alabama, then Tennessee, then Oklahoma, then Arkansas.
If Bloomberg truly believes, as he has said, that the vital objectives are to keep Sanders from turning the Democrats into socialists and then keep Donald Trump from delivering the nation to autocratic wreckage, then he needs to step back and spend his next half-billion dollars in behalf of Democrats generally and Biden specifically.
To stay in now would have Bloomberg facilitating the very things he professes to want to accomplish, saving the Democrats and beating Trump.
The only downside for Biden is that Bloomberg lingers and there was too much early voting in Super Tuesday states for him to cash in fully his South Carolina momentum.
Elizabeth Warren should drop out, of course, though Biden might appreciate her hanging around to take a few votes from Sanders.
It is Biden who has made the stirring rally, though it is as much others’ doing as his own. And it is Biden who is best-situated to do hand-to-hand combat with Sanders.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.