At first glance, it’s bad news for President Donald Trump.
He’s losing his easiest mark for the 2020 general election: The Bernie Sanders campaign isn’t only toast, it’s burnt toast.
Super Tuesday was a disaster for Bernie. Were the Bernie Bros toking up while playing video games? Whatever the case, they didn’t show up to vote, not enough of them anyway. Maybe, they didn’t intend to. Not their thing.
Only in California did Bernie save his honor (a bit), but there’s good reason to believe he only staved off the Biden wave there because of early voting.
The future primaries don’t look any better. Actually, they’re worse.
Sanders is next staring at delegate-rich Florida, where he’s alienated practically every Latino voter in a Latino state with his admiring comments about Fidel Castro. (I thought Bernie didn’t like billionaires.) Pennsylvania, New York, and other East Coast states don’t look much better. Only in Washington state does he have good prospects, and that’s far from enough.
Joe Biden is riding high for the moment. The stock market cheered his victory—or, more accurately, Sanders’s loss—with a quadruple-digit gain. (Amid the coronavirus, how much the prospect of a Sanders presidency was accounting for the recent precipitous market drawdown is hard to say. But it obviously had its effect as well.)
What Sanders has been attempting for eight years now is essentially a hostile takeover (by a registered independent) of the Democratic Party, turning it into a Socialist Party, with or without an upper-case “s.”
This caused the party to move further left than it wanted to in the days of Hillary Clinton. Now, in the era of The Squad (Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and company) that embraces Sanders (and vice-versa), they are being forced yet further left with huge tax increases funding such unpopular programs as free health care for illegal aliens (why not spa stays?).
Clintonista James Carville, among others, was yelling “Basta!” Someone had to stop the Democrats from turning into that Socialist Party before it was too late. Electoral disaster loomed.
His prayers were answered with Biden.
Or were they? Biden was basically the last man (barely) standing of a mediocre lot. They were all more or less “Bernie-lite” now, having been pushed that way. The Democrats were already too socialist. Short of implosion, there is no turning back.
Two hurdles could interrupt Biden’s march to the nomination, however. One is obvious: his proclivity for gaffes, some of which indicate a deficit it’s not politically correct to talk about. Nevertheless, it’s clear the former veep isn’t a young 77.
The second is more ominous: alleged corruption. This isn’t just the Ukraine/Hunter/Burisma affair we have heard about ad infinitum. That’s bad enough. More important is Biden’s overly friendly relationship with the Chinese communist regime (that also apparently enriched his son Hunter).
We all remember the naive “China is not an enemy” comment the former vice president made, scoffing at the possibility, before feeling constrained enough to walk it back. And that was before the coronavirus jumped the Pacific.
Sanders could utilize this were he not so friendly to communism himself. The entire Democratic Party is caught up in this double-bind. They are the people who screamed, “Russia, Russia, Russia,” in alarm, practically until our ears fell off, while being the same people who proposed the Russian reset button only a few years earlier.
So who are the Democrats anyway? An association for power, clearly. But now that association is split between the establishment and the socialists, roughly 60–40.
This is untenable. All that holds them together is enmity for Trump. Without that, they wouldn’t even have the semblance of a party anymore.
Indeed, they’re probably not, even with the pervasive Trump hatred. If Biden were to stumble, Bernie wouldn’t easily move in to replace him. The establishment would block him immediately with a new candidate.
Hillary? She’s been curiously silent of late. Why isn’t she joining the claque backing Biden? And what about Obama? Are they planning something?
It doesn’t matter. The party has already effectively split in two. It’s hard to see how they can reconcile.
The convention in Milwaukee this July may be the end of the Democratic Party as we know it.
Roger L. Simon is The Epoch Times’ senior political columnist. He is an award-winning novelist and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter. His latest book is “The GOAT.” Follow him on Twitter @rogerlsimon
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