- lowly abject turd
- Mar 23, 2009
-
|
unfortunately it was already open on my computer so...
doubtthat posted:
Joe Biden Won Last Night’s Democratic Debate
Marianne Williamson won last night’s debate if you judge exclusively in terms of charisma, rhetoric and the effective use of television. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren won last night’s debate — Sanders slightly more so, in my view — if you judge based on whether the two most important candidates onstage did what they needed to remain important. John Delaney won last night’s debate, despite earning the everlasting ire of left-wing Twitter, if you want to know which also-ran candidate made the most of his chances in the spotlight.
But the big winner wasn’t on the stage: It was Joseph Robinette Biden, currently warming up for his turn tonight, who must have been smiling all the way through the evening’s fierce moderates-versus-revolutionaries debate.
Right now, Biden is the only moderate candidate who matters. He’s climbed back to 30 percent in the polls after his stumbles at the last Democratic debate, and none of the umpteen would-be moderates in the field took advantage of that stumble even temporarily — there was no Klobuchar surge, no Hickenlooper hiccup, no Bennet bounce.
This is all good news for the front-runner, but with one important caveat: It would be very useful to Biden if what happened last night kept happening, which would require at least one other would-be moderate to hang around, qualify for the fall debates and poll at 4 or 8 percent instead of sinking perpetually back toward zero. That person could do what Delaney and to a lesser extent Hickenlooper, Klobuchar, Ryan and Bullock did last night: They could make a direct and pointed and unapologetic case against the major leftward candidates, their plans and policies and political vision, so that Biden doesn’t have to do it.
Every front-runner can benefit from having an attack dog on his side, savaging his rivals while he stays a little more above the fray. In 2008, John McCain slipped through to the Republican nomination in no small part because Mike Huckabee just hated Mitt Romney, and stuck knives in Romney every chance he got. In 2016, Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary easily because Chris Christie, an also-ran by then but also Trump’s de facto ally in the “Tri-State-Area bully” lane, savaged Marco Rubio so thoroughly that the usually smooth Floridian essentially glitched onstage during a debate, seemingly confirming every anti-Rubio critique.
In the same way, Biden benefits from the moderates-versus-Sanders and moderates-versus-Warren scenes that played out repeatedly on last night’s stage, because they help him escape the essential dilemma of his candidacy: That he can probably win if he consolidates and holds the moderate wing of the party — but that the work of consolidation, to the extent that it requires frontal attacks on the woke and neo-socialist styles of liberal politics, could threaten party unity even more than the Sanders-versus-Hillary Clinton conflict four years ago.
Imagine Biden fighting Warren and Sanders and (depending on her positioning) Kamala Harris the way Delaney did last night, on the way to a narrow victory at a contested convention. Team Biden would surely take the victory, but it’s not at all the scenario that his campaign (or any Democrat) should want. And that scenario assumes that Biden is even capable of taking the fight to the more left-wing candidates in a sustained and compelling way. On the evidence of his first debate performance, he might need an attack dog because he himself simply isn’t quick or supple enough for onstage combat anymore.
We’ll know more after tonight’s debate, which will probably test him not only with whatever Harris has prepared, but also in the same way that Warren and Sanders were tested, with Bill de Blasio filling the John Delaney role and attacking Biden from the furthest left at every opportunity. In which case Biden’s tricky task, unless he gets unexpected backup, will be to prove he can counterpunch without seeming to be too anti-left, too ready for ideological civil war.
But having emphasized all the pitfalls ahead for him, it’s worth returning to where we started: With Biden having a good night while his leftward rivals fought the moderates. Yes, come the fall he won’t have Delaney or Hickenlooper to fight his battles for him. Yes, he has to prove that he can marry toughness and finesse. Yes, his obvious path to the nomination involves a lot of intraparty strife. But he’s holding 30 percent of the primary electorate when nobody else has much more than half that, his core constituency is precisely the sort of voter who doesn’t give a rip who left-wing or media Twitter thinks is winning the debates, and three weeks after Harris supposedly demolished him, their whole encounter barely even registers in polls.
Which means that all of last night’s fireworks were just a prelude. Biden is the most important figure in the two-night spectacle — and he enters CNN’s arena tonight as still, and perhaps enduringly, the candidate to beat.
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2019 16:59
|
|
- Adbot
-
ADBOT LOVES YOU
|
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2024 13:34
|
|
- lowly abject turd
- Mar 23, 2009
-
|
Last Week Tonight is trying pretty hard to roast Biden whenever it gets a chance, and the footage it has of him from the 80s and 90s in the Senate are all INSANE, he just marches up to the mic with big dick energy like “I’m the crime bill guy, I’m the crack bill guy, I put these motherfuckers in CAGES, IDGAF” and it really highlights both how long Biden was just openly racist on the senate floor but also how hosed up it is that out of everyone, Biden was Obama’s pick for VP. Obama grew up watching Biden lock his own people up and was like “yeah, I want that guy”
his own people, do you mean ivy leaguers?
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2022 11:45
|
|
- lowly abject turd
- Mar 23, 2009
-
|
Been a while since Ritchie made a movie that didn't sound like a made up movie for a poster in the background of an actual movie. You're telling me Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre was a real film shown in theatres? The Gentlemen? Come on, Guy.
funny story about that operation fortune movie, it didn't actually make it to theatres because the baddies were ukranian and that would just be in poor taste in the wake of the russian invasion
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2024 20:59
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2019 16:59
