Bernie vs. Biden – the race is on
In politics, timing is everything. After a close win in Iowa, and a clear win in New Hampshire, the Bernie Sanders campaign had seized the narrative with a decisive win in Nevada. With the first three dominoes down, the campaign was shooting for a Super Tuesday Bernie blowout that would effectively end the electability debate. Apparently, we were high on our own supply, because the centrist Dem faction showed remarkable resilience and strategic acumen. This current episode could be titled “The Empire Strikes Back.”
We are up against the establishment Democrats, the establishment Republicans, and the establishment media.
The mainstream media is toxic. All that the cable news shows is the window on the world that the interlinked network of oligarchs who own them want you to see. The corporate media debates are disgracefully dumb and crooked.
The Republican Party machine is committed to using its structural advantages to maintain full control of U.S. politics as a minority party. Right-wing judges, computerized gerrymandering, and systematic voter suppression are how they intend to rule us for the next generation. They don’t give a damn if we don’t like it.
The wild card at this moment is whether Warren will endorse the Sanders campaign before the next tranche of primary votes next Tuesday.
Warren has been consistently ill-advised by the snake-ass DNC staffers on her team. She has basically poured gasoline over her once sterling brand and thrown a match on top of it. Sad. She could redeem her future viability as a progressive standard-bearer by endorsing Bernie. I no longer trust her political instincts, so I don’t know if she will do the right thing.
Her actions in the next few days will write that chapter. This is the question of the hour. I hope that Warren has the character to meet the challenge of history. The shelf life of her negotiating power is short.
The Joe Biden of 2016 would be running for re-election right now. The Joe Biden of 2020 is a reduced figure, incapable of complex cognitive tasks and erratic in live settings. They have clearly planned to restrict him to scripted press conferences, a limited schedule, and lots of TV ads.
The nomination process is at about the halftime and we have a virtual tie. It’s game on for the Sanders movement. We will win based on our superior ground game. Look past the image branding and see what’s in front of your eyes on live TV – Bernie is focused and feisty; Biden is a punch-drunk Irish boxer. Biden is not a good bet.
Bernie set the tone for the upcoming one-on-one primary contest with Joe Biden. He will conduct a campaign based on policies, not on Trumpian character attacks. Trump will do the nasty business himself, on Twitter. It will be dreadful.
We need to keep some powder dry at the end of this contest, no matter what. I’ll take a neo-liberal over a neo-fascist, as a matter of taste and principal.
P.S. What happened on Measure I, the SMART rail tax? They should have hired me to do their PR. We would have beat the local plutocrat who served as a Koch network cutout to kill a billion-dollar public investment.
