Vote for Joe Biden? Seriously? Biden is Bernie Sanders’s grim party in sheep’s clothing. Daniel Henninger
https://www.wsj.com/articles/vote-for-joe-biden-seriously-11603926854?mod=opinion_lead_pos8
The 2020 presidential election has been defined by three events: the emergence of the coronavirus in March, the George Floyd protests after May 25, and Rep. Jim Clyburn’s endorsement in February of Joe Biden before the South Carolina primary. There has also been one major nonevent: the Biden presidential noncampaign.
A cold-weather resurgence of the virus in the upper Midwest and Plains States has put the pandemic in front of voters in the election’s final week, while the importance of the other two events in shaping the outcome has faded, especially the Clyburn coronation.
Forgotten by many voters is that back in mid-February, after losing in Iowa and New Hampshire, it looked as if former Vice President Biden’s listless campaign would become his third failed attempt at the presidency.
Mr. Biden had distinguished himself in the primary debates only by surviving them. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the other moderate alternative to the progressive insurgency of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, wasn’t gaining traction. Mike Bloomberg landed and left like an evening moth. In short, a path was opening for Vermont democratic socialist Bernie Sanders to secure the party’s nomination.
To forestall the likelihood that a presidential nominee with an agenda well outside much of the country’s comfort zone could produce an electoral debacle for Democrats, Rep. Clyburn on Feb. 26 publicly signaled to South Carolina’s large—and largely moderate—black voting population that it was in their interests to stay in the center lane by voting for Mr. Biden rather than “a self-proclaimed democratic socialist.”
The Clyburn intervention focused Democrats’ eyes on the prize. Joe won and Bernie lost.
Mr. Sanders could have denounced the party that did the same thing to him four years ago with Hillary Clinton. Instead, he chose the pragmatism of Hyman Roth in “The Godfather Part II” on hearing that the mob had rubbed out a close friend: “When I heard it, I wasn’t angry,” Roth said. “When he turned up dead, I let it go.”
Bernie Sanders knew that Mr. Biden’s primary victory was largely symbolic, and this week it looks possible that things may turn out fine for Sen. Sanders, who above all else is a professional.
Almost immediately, Mr. Biden and the party came his way—to do business with Bernie, his surrogates, his base and his agenda. Donald Trump has said the Democrats stiffed Bernie. No they didn’t. Joe Biden is Bernie in sheep’s clothing.
Standing up Mr. Biden’s smiley face rather than Bernie’s scowl to run against the persistent national fatigue with the pandemic shutdowns and Mr. Trump’s self-promotion was a shrewd call by the Democrats’ bloodless establishment. But then May 25 happened.
The protests, violence and ransackings in the aftermath of George Floyd carried on for weeks in U.S. cities. It included a long occupation of downtown Portland, Ore., and the looting of Midtown Manhattan and of shops in working-class neighborhoods in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Cleveland and elsewhere. African-American police chiefs resigned—forced out or disgusted at getting no support from progressive Democratic politicians.
Despite the images on TV, the party’s simpatico media commentators had to turn themselves inside out trying to create a fictional barrier of responsibility for the violence between “peaceful protesters” and the people 20 feet away assaulting buildings, hurling rocks and setting cop cars on fire.
These events put Democrats in a difficult spot. They weren’t just spontaneous acts of rage. The concurrent protests in so many cities and the individuals who spoke on their behalf revealed a darker side to the Democrats—a party whose most visible supporters see the United States as a failed nation, a country of irredeemable inequities and people with reflexively racist instincts.
An ideological movement that emerged in January 2017 as the anti-Trump “resistance”—led by Nancy Pelosi, the New York Times’s “1619 Project” and various social-media platforms—ended up in the streets as a grim mass insurrection amid shattered glass, burning buildings and toppled or defaced monuments to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Tutored in anticapitalist pieties, younger Democrats convinced themselves the local shop owner was as guilty as the statue in the town square.
Rep. Clyburn’s decision to go with Joe Biden looks like genius in retrospect. Mr. Biden’s faltering, insubstantial persona floats his noncampaign past the party’s embrace of these historical repudiations and his own thin pandemic plan—by either mouthing platitudes (“It’s a moment that calls for hope and light and love”) or pretending that President Trump caused 200,000 Covid-19 deaths.
Mr. Biden’s promise to America’s voters is that he will heal the country’s divisions. He won’t. What has come into plain view the past year is that the Democratic Party, despite its liberal traditions, has allowed itself to descend into a deeply pessimistic view of America. For all his flailing about, Donald Trump by comparison looks like the optimist.
But voters still ask: How has it come to this, a choice between the devil or the deep blue sea? The deep blue sea has always scared me.
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