And then there were two…and a couple of stragglers.
As of this writing, the remaining Democrats running for president are Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Tulsi Gabbard. That’s it, that’s the best one of the two major political parties in the United States in 2020 could come up with.
Of course, the only criteria Democrats have for their candidate is “someone who can beat Donald Trump.” That’s an interesting bar for people who claim to care about the country. They don’t give a damn who their candidate is, what they want to do, or even if they have the mental capacity to string together a coherent sentence, as long as they poll well against the president more than half a year before anyone will vote for anything.
They differ on who that person is, with Sanders having the advantage of an army of true believers - comrades in arms, if you will - who’d do anything for him. Think of how much praise those members of the Iraqi government were heaping on Saddam Hussein as they were being dragged out to be executed, on his orders, and you get a sense of how deep that loyalty runs.
Biden, the only other remaining candidate with a chance at the nomination, inspires no one. His lackluster campaign has been one unforced error after another. His slogan might as well be, “I know Barack Obama.” His mentions of the former president are downright Pavlovian, he finds a way to shoehorn it into every answer. It’s like Barack Obama is running by proxy. It’s unclear who thinks a man on the other side of the edge of senility is a good choice to lead the free world, but at least he doesn’t admit he’s a socialist.
The other two, Gabbard and Warren, are done (or never really were).
Gabbard won’t quit because she’s got nothing better to do. She’s an insignificant member of Congress who isn’t liked in her own party because she occasionally criticizes them, and they don’t tolerate differing opinions. She’s also an isolationist, which endears her to some on the right who happily ignore her other, radical left-wing positions because it allows them to seem bipartisan. Why would she quit when she gets to travel the country on someone else’s dime while avoiding work? It’s liberating to have so little staff and an acceptance that you aren’t going to win, it frees you up from needing large fundraising numbers. All you need is the airfare and hotel covered, the rental car is a bonus.
Elizabeth Warren has a tough choice to make: does she believe the things she’s run on, or does she want to help Joe Biden? She can’t have both. If she drops out she helps Bernie, if she stays in she helps Joe by siphoning votes away from Bernie. Aside from a sex scandal involving Bernie and Biden, with each other, there’s no way she can win (and then only maybe because that might fly in the modern Democratic Party). The writing is on the wall, or the smoke signals are in the air (to put it in terms Warren can pretend to understand), the only question remains is whether or not she as big of a fraud as a candidate for president as she was when she was a candidate for a job at Harvard.
So the choice for Democrats comes down to two people who’ve never really held adult jobs outside of government. Bernie floundered until finding a town in Vermont as crazy as he is, and Joe has collected a government check since his rumbling days with Corn Pop. What both of these men don’t understand about making it in the real world could just about fit into the Grand Canyon.
It’s clear the party elites, the people who run the show behind the scenes, are desperate for Biden to win. Sure, he’s not playing with a full deck, but at least he’s not showing all his cards.
Bernie’s biggest mistake was being too honest. He admires left-wing dictators and wants to destroy capitalism. He couches it with the word “democratic” before he says socialism, but socialism is socialism. Say what you will about the man, and he is crazy, but at least he’s not a liar.
Biden, on the other hand, has a long history of lying. He doesn’t just lie about his policy proposals, he lies about his accomplishments, he lies about things he’s done (being arrested for trying to see Nelson Mandela in prison, for example), there’s very little he doesn’t lie about. His only defense against all the lies he’s told is he might be too senile to know he’s lying.
So one candidate is crazy, the other is a different kind of crazy. Of course, you have to be a little crazy yourself to vote for a Democrat running for any office, so it’s only fitting.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily radio show on WCBM in Maryland, and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.