The Independent - 05.03.2020

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has been done about it, not even during the eight-year rule of America’s first president to meaningfully
represent the voter-suppressed.


And never is it more relevant than when assessing America’s options at the end of what is traditionally
somewhere towards the end of the middle bit of the beginning of its great quadrennial whittling down. We
now know that the next president of the United States will be a septuagenarian white guy. The voice of
youth, in November’s election, will belong to 73-year-old President Trump, a man who has been labelled
senile by former allies and foes alike.


The other guy (and yes, it will be a guy – they tried a woman once, to be fair, and look where that got them)
will be either Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. The former will be two weeks short of his 78th birthday. The
latter will already be 79. Super Tuesday leaves that contest too close to call, which inevitably means it is
already being called with ever increasing certainty. Knowing what can’t be known is the lifeblood of the
punditocracy. If Sanders was polling at 99 per cent among Democrat voters, and 77-year-old Biden was in
bed having contracted coronavirus, you can expect to be told that this race isn’t over.


Because either man can clearly win, both definitely will. One man who can’t is Mike Bloomberg. It has
already been pointed out that his solitary primary victory, in American Samoa, has cost him more in
campaigning than the GDP of American Samoa itself – some $700m.


The more pertinent question is why does American Samoa love Mike Bloomberg so much? Bloomberg was
certainly the most vocal candidate on the subject of climate change, which may have appealed to the people
of a tiny protectorate that several projections show may very well be underwater in the next few decades.
The same projections give Miami around 30 years, so maybe Bloomberg just went too early. Oh well, he is
only 78. His time will come again.


The voice of youth, in November’s election, will belong to 73-year-old President Trump, a man labelled
senile by former allies and foes alike


On current trajectories, it will surely not be long before Bloomberg is richer than America itself, so the
American Samoa numbers are cause for optimism. As long as you can outspend the combined GDP of the
people you want to vote for you, you should be fine. Your entry level hot take on all this is that Biden’s
resurrection shows the Democrats are suddenly doing what the Republicans should have done in 2016 –
rallying round the most likely moderate guy to take out the radical. “Bernie can’t win,” so they say. And,
well, it’s not like they’ve ever been wildly wrong about this kind of thing before.


On Tuesday’s evidence, the Bidens like nothing more than to take out the radical, as pictures of Biden’s
wife Jill going the full Wendi Deng on an anti-dairy protester revealed, an act of immense bravery that was
repaid moments later, when her husband got her mixed up with his own sister. Of course, if the
Republicans had just done this four years ago, they could have stopped Trump is a hypothesis only mildly
troubled by the fact that Trump beat Clinton and none of the others would have done.


Sanders, naturally, is blaming “the establishment”. They’re only voting for Biden because they don’t want
him to win. Which is true. It’s also kind of how democracy works. Hard and fast rules are slow to come by in
modern politics, but when you’re blaming the voters, that’s definitely the moment you’ve lost.


How long will it be before Sanders is claiming, like Jeremy Corbyn, to have “won the argument”? America
could never elect a socialist, not that Bernie Sanders is one. He wants massive investment in healthcare and
education, but stops far short of anything like a fully nationalised health service, leaving him significantly to
the right of every major British politician of the last 70 years, including Enoch Powell.

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