Joe Biden proved a superhero in Super Tuesday performance

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. It’s some kind of miracle.

“I am here to report: We are very much alive!” Biden exulted in a victory speech. You could hear, in his thunderous voice, 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. Biden 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 prefer. 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 given what happened Wednesday morning: Michael Bloomberg, who had a decidedly un-super Tuesday, dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden. Votes that would’ve gone to Bloomberg are much more likely to go to Biden than 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 are portraying 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.

But 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, for the compelling candidates of color.

So much for the gradations of progressivism. Biden is smack in the middle of the party’s mainstream. He’s also the establishment incarnate, moderation made flesh. Sanders, well, he’s the revolution. That’s his motto, his mantra.

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 the party has arrived at a fork in the road and it’s much neater than many expected.

Many anxious Democratic voters have wanted to unite behind a candidate so everyone can then focus their energies on getting rid of Trump, and they needed just a few prompts to do that. They got those prompts this week.

Sanders should be concerned — not just because Biden has staged an extraordinary comeback or because Bloomberg’s exit will invariably redound to Biden’s benefit, especially if Bloomberg starts spending big on Biden’s behalf. Sanders isn’t flexing the electoral muscle 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.