Stalemate.
No matter who you support you will have enough justification to believe your candidate won the debate. Nothing will change on Tuesday. Bernie made his case, that it’s about the money, but he has made it before and it certainly wasn’t the breakthrough performance he needed to stem the tide.
He’s right, of course, but this isn’t about that.
Joe will have a woman VP! He will nominate a black woman for supreme court justice!
And that’s how Joe won. This is not about policy differences or voting records or intellectually nuanced arguments about how China or Cuba may do something that isn’t an abject horror (right again, but a huge political miscalculation).
Joe made news. Joe will stay in the news. Joe will be the news.
This is a clinic on electioneering. This was another big political stroke and it will work. Joe will be a safe vote that will feel revolutionary and Tuesday will be his. Not dirty politics, but very shrewd, finely crafted for maximum effect. One more day to move the needle and it will be Joe that is in the news. It leads to the speculation of who the VP will be, and the cable networks will be incapable of resisting this low hanging fruit. Hell, I have my cynical ideas of who the choice might be.
So we are going to talk about it, which means we are talking about Joe. And on Tuesday they vote.
They will vote for Joe.
Oh sure, Joe stumbled on a few words when he got real wound up, and Bernie said ebola when he meant coronavirus but caught himself and corrected it, but those were all silly gaffs on both sides and not worthy of serious mention. “Much ado…” and all that. Bernie tried to make the fleecing of America an issue, and incomprehensibly America yawned.
He was right, of course, but this isn’t about that.
Joe is a skilled poliitician. It is why Sanders supporters find him abhorrent, a personification of a dark corner of their worldview. A politician is a manipulator of public opinion that takes that as currency and trades it for all manner of other things, some noble, some not. Joe is demonstrably better at that than Bernie is. He has the public by the short hairs, and between his own instincts and what I judge to be a very skilled team around him he isn’t likely to let them go. Historically it never happens that the delegate leader coming out of Super Tuesday relinquishes that lead, so he has that going for him and now he has money. He isn’t going to be the first. He will enter the cyber-convention with a plurality and be nominated for the Presidency of the United States.
Bernie World will mourn and rage and try to burn the house down, but it will be surprisingly ineffective. Not that many want to burn a house that is already on fire. Covid-19 has created an insecurity that is unlike anything I’ve seen since 9/11. Schools, restaurants, theatres and bars closing across the country, stock market diving off a cliff and who knows what is next. Met a man at the grocery store that wasn’t worried, that this was just a Democratic hoax. This was last night! But most are quickly evolving beyond that and know that this is an unprecedented time, something even us older folks have never seen, and there is only so much insecurity a population can take. They seek shelter, not revolution, and that is what Joe is selling.
Tueday, Joe will be so popular that the Joe aisle will be sold out.