It's been a crazy week. Joe Biden is now officially The Comeback Kid with truly one of the biggest turnarounds in campaign history. All but forgotten two weeks go, Joe is now the clear frontrunner with Bernie scrambling to stay in the race. It reminds me a bit of 2004 when John Kerry was able to so quickly consolidate the Democratic vote and send Howard Dean packing. I just hope the final result isn't the same. Kerry lost to Bush in the general election.
I was never excited about either Joe or Bernie. I thought both should have sat out this election, but it seems voters want a well-known name and aren't willing to take any chances on newcomers. Bernie's revolution played out as expected. His 2016 candidacy was largely predicated on resistance to Hillary's nomination, not a sea change in American politics. It did help spur the campaigns of young progressive candidates in the 2018 Midterms, so that is very positive, but otherwise he was really nothing more than another Ron Paul.
As for Joe, what can one say? Let's just hope he holds it together, avoiding any major gaffes and picking a VP that helps bind the fractured party together. My pick would be Kamala Harris, but then progressives probably want someone more in line with their views like Liz Warren. However, he needs youth to help balance the ticket.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is scrambling to deal with the nasty coronavirus spreading across the country and a stock market in panic mode. After a precipitous 4000-point drop last week, it has been all over the place this week. Net result, a Dow once inching close to the magic number of 30,000 now sits at 26,120 and is likely to take another tumble today.
Rate cuts and quantitative easing have yielded no positive results. Jerome Powell seems a man completely lost as what to do next. He is repeating all the same mistakes made by the Fed during the Bush administration in an effort to stave off the inevitable. It is better to prepare for a recession instead of keep trying to hedge against it. Of course, His Trumpness will have no recession on his watch, so Powell is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I don't think it is so much the coronavirus that is battering stocks as it is the ineptitude of governments, particularly the US government, to deal with the potential pandemic. Trump had cut funding and staffing to the Center of Disease Control over the years, leaving it a virtual empty shell of what it once was. Now, he is scrambling to put it back together under the helm of Mike Pence. This is probably the worst choice he could have made -- a religious nut who dismissed previous health scares and has no clue how to manage one that is spreading so rapidly. One can only hope there are better minds on the task force itself.
Washington has been the hardest hit state given its strong Asian connection. The most deaths have been reported in the Seattle metropolitan area. However, many states are now reporting cases after the conservative media tried to politicize coronavirus as a "Democrat disease," whose only purpose is to bring down the president. Trump hasn't helped himself with some of the outlandish comments he has made in recent days.
As the disease spreads, and is no longer confined to the Asian community, fears spread with it. Trump tried to downplay the mortality rate, which the World Health Organization estimates at 3.4 percent. This is a significant increase over an earlier 2 percent. Of course, this is largely due to the excessive mortality rates in China and Iran. In Japan and South Korea, both hard hit, the mortality rate is much lower. Still, the thought of so many persons potentially losing their lives is very scary!
Israel claims it will have a vaccine within weeks, but this is largely political posturing on Dr. Bibi's part. Japan appears to have had the most success in containing the virus as we look for answers as to how to deal with its spread. Don't expect anything out of the Mike Pence task force anytime soon, although Trump assures us it will all be over by April. He's had President Xi's assurance on this.
Like politics, viruses mutate and form new strains. Some more devastating than others. The Republican Party has been completely taken over by the Trump virus, but the Democrats have managed to hold the Bernie virus in check and now appear to be curtailing it all together, thanks to the trusty old Biden virus that appears immune to anything.
How Joe pulled off his Super Tuesday landslide will be the stuff of lore for years to come. It was largely thanks to a huge groundswell of Black Democrats in the South, but Joe also scored big in Massachusetts. Maine and Minnesota, and held his own in California. He beat Bernie across the board, including cutting into his super majority in Vermont. Bernie had over 80 percent of the vote in his home state in 2016, but barely more than 50 percent this time around.
Probably the most telling state is Minnesota. If Bernie had any hope of winning the nomination it was scoring big in the Midwest. That's why he is now exerting all his energies in Michigan, giving up on the South where he failed to gain any traction. It's all the more difficult for him with the centrist candidates supporting Biden. Liz has yet to come out in support of Bernie, and may not do so given the acrimony that arose between them over the last few weeks.
Bernie is once again all alone. The beautiful loser that attracts Hollywood liberals like Susan Sarandon and radical representatives like AOC. That's pretty much the story of his life. A man forever destined to be on the outside looking in. That's what happens when you model your campaign upon beautiful losers of the past like Eugene Debs.
Socialists work best at the local and state level. It is virtually impossible to get a significant groundswell across the country to propel you to the presidency. Debs' best showing was 3.4 percent on his fifth try for President in 1920, and this during a time when there was so much labor unrest in the country. Today, most persons are relatively content. What we are looking for is not a revolution, but rather how to fill the cracks that many people fall through. This is why AOC does well in her New York borough and Ilhan Omar in her Minnesota district. They represent those who aren't getting a fair shake, and making their voices heard.
The idea that this kind of localized angst would spill over into a national movement was patently absurd, but fed by the likes of Michael Moore who thought Bernie would ignite this great passion. However, Bernie was never more than Howard Beale, giving his voice to many dissatisfied Americans, particularly young Americans, but only enough to generate television news ratings, not the votes he needed to win the nomination.
Why he even ran as a Democrat is beyond me, given he always strongly identified himself as an Independent. I guess he wanted to show that he was a good sport. He would see how far his ideas would take him inside the party and then no more. He didn't want to risk being blamed for helping elect Trump.
Unfortunately, he has generated such a fanatical base that many will probably turn their backs on the Democratic Party once and for all, determined to find the next beautiful loser to voice their angst. Maybe Susan will run for President in 2024. More likely, you will see a stronger progressive caucus emerge within the Democratic Party, pinning their hopes on an AOC candidacy in 2028.
What most Americans want right now is normalcy. They are tired of the orange blob in the White House and long for a return to someone who isn't going to constantly be embarrassing the nation. Joe is prone to gaffes, but at least he apologizes for them. Donald doubles down. The big question now is who Joe picks as his running mate. James Clyburn, who has emerged as the kingmaker, says it should be a woman. Who is anyone's guess, lets just hope Joe doesn't blow it.
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