This is about to get ugly
Joe Biden’s massive surge yesterday has resulted in a roughly tied delegate count (some of California’s delegates are still being divvied up). If you’re just looking at the current totals, you might think Bernie Sanders still has a chance. But then you look at how Biden is going to win states like Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi in blowouts, and you realize Biden is going to be the nominee. He’ll get more delegates than Sanders, and more popular votes.
If Bernie Sanders were smart, he’d accept this reality, and he’d drop out soon and conditionally endorse Joe Biden. It would give Bernie an opportunity to help steer Biden’s policies, because Biden would spend the general election needing to keep Bernie’s endorsement. For that matter, if Bernie gets behind Biden now, and helps ensure that Biden beats Trump by a large margin, it’ll be enough to help shift the Senate back to the Democrats. In such case Bernie would be in line to become the Chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, where he’d start getting to do the kind of stuff he’s always wanted to do in the Senate.
Here’s the problem. How can this be said diplomatically? Bernie isn’t smart. He instinctively knows the country needs to move to the left. But his plans for making it happen are simplistic magical gibberish. Nor does he seem to understand that in a majority rule society, progress requires working with your would-be allies.
So it wasn’t shocking to see Bernie Sanders give his most divisive speech yet today. Bernie made angry, bizarre, and misleading attacks on Joe Biden’s integrity so severe that very fair MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace called it a “smear” against Biden during her afternoon show. Bernie can’t handle the fact that the majority of voters are going to pick Biden over him, so he’s getting angry and defensive, and he’s doing exactly the crap he did to Hillary Clinton once he started falling behind her in the popular vote count in 2016.
Last time, Bernie Sanders came around way too late, and way too weakly. It ended up severely costing the Democrats across the board in 2016, and it also ended up costing Bernie his shot at being Senate Finance Committee Chairman. Based on his history and nature, I don’t see Bernie coming around soon enough this time either. I see him making an uglier and uglier spectacle of things as he falls apart. But this time around, most people are going to unite behind Biden now, instead of waiting for Bernie to finally sign off on it. Of course I hope I’m wrong, and Bernie gets behind Biden sooner rather than later.
