FEBRUARY 29 2020 LISTENER 25
Throughout 2019, the media kept pointing out Biden’s short-
comings and vulnerabilities. He was lacklustre in the candidates’
debates, often got tangled up in verbal spaghetti, seemed to think his
greatest selling point was someone else altogether (Barack Obama),
kept harking back to a golden age of bipartisanship far removed
from the ugly zero-sum game now played by the Republican Party
and had crashed and burnt in his two previous attempts to win
the nomination.
None of it seemed to matter. The message of the polls was that
the public didn’t care about that stuff: they
saw Biden as the anti-Trump, a restoration of
normality and, accordingly, weren’t deterred
by the incoherence, the anachronisms, the
apparent lack of a relevant political identity.
But having observed Biden in the flesh
and listened to his unfiltered message, Dem-
ocratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire
decided they did care about that stuff. And
although Democrats in those states are over-
whelmingly white, which the party as a whole isn’t, and ardently
liberal, which the country as a whole most definitely isn’t, Biden
has walked into a trap of his own making: how do you sustain a
candidacy based on electability when not many people are voting
for you?
Since 1972, no candidate from either party who finished below
second in both Iowa and New Hampshire has won the nomination.
Asked about Biden’s chances of coming back from the near-dead,
veteran Democratic consultant Bob Shrum said, “I don’t think it’s
impossible, but it’s unlikely and would fly in the face of all our
knowledge of political history.”
KERNEL OF DEMOCRATIC HOPE
The chief beneficiary thus far of Biden’s slippage has been Bernie
Sanders, a 78-year-old who suffered a heart attack last October and
has just reneged on a promise to release his health records. Polling
guru Nate Silver’s model is forecasting a 38% likelihood that no
candidate will arrive at the Democratic Convention in Milwaukee
in July with a majority of delegates and a 36% chance that Sanders
will in fact do so. Biden is a distant third.
As the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri put it, South Bend,
Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg “seems like he emerged fully formed
from an electability vat”. The conventional wisdom, however, is that
he can go so far but no further because he struggles to gain traction
with the Afro-American community. The impressive Midwesterner,
Amy Klobuchar, is an even longer shot.
The prospect of Sanders emerging as the candidate has caused con-
sternation among those who believe a self-styled democratic socialist
is simply unelectable. The sceptics point to the recent UK election in
which the Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn with whom Sanders
bears comparison on a number of grounds,
was taken to the cleaners.
And whereas progressives such as Alex-
andria Ocasio-Cortez, a leading Sanders
surrogate, and her so-called “Squad” get lots
of media coverage, they represent solidly
Democratic districts. The gains that enabled
the Democrats to capture the House of Rep-
resentatives in the 2018 mid-term elections
were achieved by moderate candidates. Not
a single Republican-held district was flipped by a left-winger.
The counterargument is that Sanders’ authenticity and crystal-
clear message will generate enthusiasm and galvanise voters who
wouldn’t turn out for a conventional centrist candidate. (According
to the polls, barely half of Sanders supporters are committed to back-
ing the Democratic candidate if it’s not Sanders.) It is also pointed
out that, at the same stage in the 2016 cycle, Trump’s Republican
rivals were insisting that he was “unelectable”.
The counter-counterargument is that, back then, Trump wasn’t
up against an incumbent president. And, far from being a socialist,
Trump is a poster boy for capitalism, or at least a louche version of it.
It’s quite possible that, within a month or two, the field will be
down to three runners: Trump (73), Sanders and former New York
mayor Michael Bloomberg (also 78), who has so far spent US$400
million of his own money to make himself part of the conversation.
What would it say about America if the last candidates standing were
three white septuagenarian males, two billionaires and a museum-
piece socialist, none of whom particularly identifies with the party
he purports to represent?
Perhaps that, as diplomat and philosopher Joseph de Maistre
(1753-1821) wrote, “Every nation gets the government it deserves.” lGE
TTY (^) I
MA
GE
S
Trump will interpret
re-election as a green
light to get medieval
on pretty much anyone
who didn’t kiss his ring
during his first term.
Odd ones out: from left,
septuagenarians Donald
Trump, Michael Bloomberg,
Joe Biden and Bernie
Sanders; Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez; Pete Buttigieg.