Last week, after being crushed by yet more Biden delegates than Bernie Sanders can ever survive, the senator's campaign manager promised a clinical reassessment of the revolution's preexisting condition of a dead end.
Many took that as a hopeful signal that Sen. Sanders had finally detoxed and gotten clean. But, this is the famously relapsing, campaign-addicted Bernie we're talking about. Thus, said a high-level aide this Tuesday, "Sanders is still running for president. If there is a debate in April, he plans to be there."
Joe Biden does not. "My focus is just dealing with this crisis right now. I haven't thought about any more debates," the Democratic nominee told CNN a day later. "I think we've had enough debates. I think we should get on with this." (The network also reported that a "D.N.C. spokeswoman declined to say whether a debate would still take place in April as planned or move later in the calendar." Forgetaboutit.)
"That the Sanders campaign is [now] signaling … that he would be on a debate stage in April is a strikingly public sign of the Vermont senator’s determination to wield political influence and challenge Mr. Biden for primacy despite the former vice president’s nearly insurmountable delegate lead clinch of the nomination," wrote the NY Times.
Challenging Biden for primacy is nothing more than pathetic. Nearly two-thirds of the remaining delegates Bernie would need to win, which, simply, is "not going to happen unless there is some catastrophic event" — i.e., a Biden stroke, or worse — said, to the Wall Street Journal, a former delegate counter for Pete Buttigieg. But Bernie's "determination to wield political influence" is no quantitative, nor somatic, nor simply pathetic matter. It could, instead, mean Biden's loss of hundreds of thousands of votes throughout the republic and, more critically, in essential swing states.
For it translates into dragging out Bernie's withered candidacy until July's Democratic convention — and its formulation of an unread platform — leaving only three months, not six, until Election Day. And that translates into half the time that Sanders could rally his troops into tolerating, at least, a vote for Biden. I write could rather than can, since Bernie's commitment to such a task remains an empirical uncertainty.
As insanely, unshakably devoted as the incumbent's troops are, Joe Biden may need every possible vote. Even with unprecedented, self-induced calamity surrounding Trump from every political angle, Democrats & Friends should not take 2020 for granted. On the president's side are a fanatical army, Russian interference, voter suppression, post-truthism, televised oceans of vicious lies and wrongly claimed credit, and, perhaps above all, his wholesale absence of any scruples.
I took 2016 for granted. I won't this time around. The "opposition" is more than that; it's a killing, political enemy in need of dispositive extermination. The Democratic nominee must muster all possible forces, yet toward that objective, Bernie Sanders is still an obstruction. And that — unless the Vermont senator soon comes to his senses — must be factored in to Joe Biden's potential.