What was all that back there?
Many years ago a comedian, whose name I can’t recall, had a joke about a driver who races up behind him, tries to pass him, makes all kinds of aggressive gestures toward him, then finally gets ahead of him… and ends up stuck sitting with him at the next red light anyway. The comedian then gets out of his car, taps on the window of the other driver, and says “What was all that back there?” That’s the feeling I get when I look back at the past few weeks of the Democratic primary race.
Before we headed into Iowa and New Hampshire, the two candidates who seemed most on track for the nomination were Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren. Also in the mix was Bernie Sanders, with his enthusiastic but ultimately narrow base, and his inability to connect with anyone outside his base. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar were sort of just there.
Then Pete shockingly won Iowa, Amy severely outperformed in New Hampshire, Mike Bloomberg snuck into the race and took a bunch of points away from Biden in the polls, and Warren was so forgotten by the media that the moderators basically ignored her during the early February debate. Suddenly we were being told that the race had turned completely upside down, all because two states got to go first who tend to cast their votes in quirky and non-representative fashion.
But now that the race has removed itself from the Iowa / New Hampshire vortex and the Bloomberg distortion field, things are once again shifting in rapid fashion. Bloomberg got on stage and wilted like a deleted Trump tweet. Bernie is back to being a cult figure with a lot of troubling questions he can’t answer. Pete and Amy are back to being two smart people who spend far too much time arguing with each other. Warren came out of the debate with the clear momentum, and Biden was the only other person who came out of the debate in good shape.
So now we’re right back to Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden being in the driver seat, and the others are all back to just sort of being there. It’s almost as if the past few weeks didn’t even happen. Maybe I was wrong when I said that Iowa and New Hampshire weren’t going to tell us much about who’s going to be the nominee. Those two states did tell us plenty; it’s was just loud chaotic gibberish that we’re now trying to figure out how to unhear.
