Joe Biden just performed a miracle

What a difference a few days make. They brought Joe Biden back from the dead.

After a landslide victory in South Carolina on Saturday, he collected a bonanza of important endorsements Sunday and Monday. Then, on Super Tuesday, when 14 states voted, he did exponentially better than almost anyone predicted. He probably exceeded his own dreams.

Bernie Sanders supposedly had the momentum in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Biden just stole it. He’s resuscitated, resurrected, resplendent.

“I am here to report: We are very much alive!” Biden exulted in a victory speech, and you could almost see the adrenaline pumping from his pores. You could hear, in his thunderous voice, an amalgam of amazement and pure joy. Rambling, bumbling Biden was mostly gone. In his stead was an exuberant, articulate champion.

Biden won in places where black voters make all the difference and in places where they don’t. He won in places — Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma — where he hadn’t even competed. He won Virginia by 30 points. He won Texas, where Sanders’ outreach to Latino voters was supposed to put him over the top. He won and won and won, taking the overall lead in the delegate count.

And his momentum may be even bigger than the Super Tuesday returns suggested, for three reasons. One, early voting in some states preceded his surge and probably didn’t reflect it. Two, the coalescing of other Democrats around him is so new that it may not have fully registered with voters. Three, exit polls affirmed that Democratic voters care more about choosing the fiercest adversary for President Donald Trump than about embracing a candidate whose positions they like best. Super Tuesday cast Biden as that adversary. It gave him that glow. So he could shine brighter still when another six states vote in a week.

That’s especially true in light of what happened Wednesday morning: Mike Bloomberg, who had an epically disappointing and decidedly un-super Tuesday, dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden. Votes that would have gone to him are much more likely to go to Biden than to Sanders.

Sanders could be in big trouble. Or not. He’s going to win California, the state with by far the greatest trove of delegates. And his impassioned supporters have already begun to portray Biden’s Super Tuesday showing as the product of some Democratic establishment trickery. Who knows how this will play out? If 2016 and 2020 so far have taught us anything, it’s not to get ahead of ourselves.

This much is safe to say: The landscape of the Democratic primary was messy, and now it’s clean. So is the choice. The contest for the party’s presidential nomination comes down to two very distinct visions and two very different old men.

So much for the most crowded field of Democratic aspirants in memory. So much for that field’s diversity — for the formidable women in the hunt, for the compelling candidates of color.

So much for the gradations of progressivism, for the shades of gray. Biden is as smack in the middle of the party’s mainstream, whatever that is, as they come. He’s also the establishment incarnate, moderation made flesh. Sanders, well, he’s the revolution. That’s his motto, his mantra. It might as well be his middle name.

Biden calls for healing. Sanders vows to fight.

Whose Democratic Party is it, anyway? We may need the rest of March — or longer — to find out. But we know, thanks to the clearing and clarifying function of the states that weighed in Tuesday, that the party has arrived at a fork in the road much neater than many of us were expecting.

Bloomberg is formally gone. Elizabeth Warren — who did miserably Tuesday, losing even her home state — is effectively out of contention, too.

“What in God’s name happened to Joe Biden?” I wrote a few weeks ago, and I could and should ask the question again. But, this time, I’m wondering about his strength, not his weakness. I do have preliminary answers and explanations: Many anxious Democratic voters have been itching to unite behind a candidate so that everyone can then turn their attention and focus their energies on getting rid of Trump, and they needed just a few prompts to do that. They got those prompts over the past 96 hours.

Sanders isn’t flexing the electoral muscle that he keeps claiming to have. In some states Tuesday, he did significantly worse than he had when he ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016, and this wasn’t the first time that his performance this year paled next to what he achieved four years ago.

How can he boast of an expanding movement if, by some measures, he’s contracting? And how does that contraction square with his insistence that he’s the one to vanquish Trump?

On Super Tuesday, Biden was the superhero. He could yet step on his own cape: He’s Biden, after all. But until then, he’s soaring.