Here’s the thing: Bernie failed to grapple with the fact that like Obama, he got an easy ride from a press that hated Hilary Clinton. Once left to his own devices, well, it doesn’t matter how popular you are with voters under 30 if they only make up 15% of the electorate that shows up (as was the case in Michigan). Yeah, Bernie may be big with the young people, and he may be moving the window on Democratic policy goals in future, but when it’s down to two candidates, your viability as a candidate gets marked to market pretty quickly.
Because it looks like it’s gonna be Joe. Once he proved he could win South Carolina, it’s like everyone said “okay, let’s go” and that was that. He thinks he can win, and he’s not the only one, when you consider that Trump literally just weathered an impeachment that came about as a result of efforts to sandbag Biden out of the race. This is a single issue race, and the issue is “get that orange asshole out of here.”
I mean, of course it is. We’re seeing the consequences more than ever now. Stock market is officially back in bear territory, and I don’t mean Berkeley. It turns out that slashing the CDC’s budget for pandemic response in 2018 has consequences in 2020. And ironically enough for a solipsistic dementia case who thinks he only has to be the president of the people who voted for him, he’s paved the way for COVID-19 to run riot through the precise demographic that put him in that office to begin with. I mean…buy the ticket, take the ride.
Which is a warning and an imperative at the same time. This is what we signed up for by not packing our bags and fleeing the country in January 2017. We knew it was going to be harsh, and ugly, and we might not all make it, but there was a chance – one – that the old ways could work one more time, that an election in 2020 could stop the bleeding. And this intersects nicely with Joe Biden, who absolutely should not feel any guilt for not running in 2016, who had every reason to pack it in, but who apparently needed to give it one more run – and who now finds himself as the guy.
So this time, we know the mission, we know the stakes, and we know what happens if we lose. And the excuses are gone – there’s no speculating about what it might be like for Trump to be President because now there’s four years of economic stagnation outside the NYSE, four years of children in camps, four years of lighting our foreign relations on fire, and now, four years of destroying our defenses against a literal pandemic.
We’re out of excuses. This is last call. It’s Joe or go.