Arizona debate may be Sanders last chance to show he is more in control of his own mind than Biden is of his

As a Green Bay Packer fan since I can remember, sometimes even if you don’t really believe a “shocking” result will occur, you still like being “shocked” nonetheless. After the Packers lost to the 49ers 37-8 during this past regular season, I desperately wanted to be “shocked” as much as the “experts” would be if the Packers beat the 49ers in the NFC Championship Game and booked a place in the Super Bowl. I was quickly disabused of such notions after the Packers fell behind 27-0 at halftime; despite a “comeback” attempt where they scored touchdowns on three consecutive drives, it wasn’t enough to dispel the observation that the result was nearly as much a “drubbing” as the previous game. Beating the Seahawks was a nice little playoff win, but it didn’t soften the blow much.

This is much the feeling I have since Super Tuesday in regard to Bernie Sanders nomination chances. Sanders appears to have won California, but did not dominate the delegate haul as predicted. He may yet “win” Washington, but his bare plurality in “liberal” King County at this time suggests that even if  he does he will only be treading water in the delegate count. But while some in the media are gloating over Sanders’ alleged “drubbing” and “pummeling” in the past week, no one should be overestimating Biden’s appeal to voters. The reality is that Biden wasn’t many voters first choice; although Sanders lost every county in Tennessee on Super Tuesday, he lost Knox County by just 163 votes, and the Knox County cumulative voting report showed just how much of an effect that Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropping out of the race before election day had. Early voting showed Sanders receiving 29.9 percent of those votes, compared to 20.5 for Mike Bloomberg and just 15.5 percent for Biden. But voting on election day showed Bloomberg receiving less than 10 percent of the vote, while Biden outpolled Sanders 41 to 33 percent. In early voting, Buttigieg and Klobuchar had received more than 3,000 votes—18 percent—but only 174 votes total (just 0.6 percent) cast on election day. No doubt this scenario was played out in many states where Sanders would have been expected to win. 

It isn’t just the way the scales were deliberately tipped to favor “anyone but Bernie.” The absolutely despicable attacks that he and his supporters have had to endure from the media was the height of mendacity. Take for example comments made by MSNBC “contributor” Jason Johnson, who raged against “racist white liberals” who supported Sanders, and said of black women who supported him “I don’t care how many people from the island of misfit black girls you throw out there to defend you,” Sanders was still the “racist” candidate. Called-out on this commentary, Johnson only “apologized” for the “hurt” he caused black women—not for his ridiculous, racist accusations against “the Sanders campaign and the behavior of his staff and supporters.” I mean, the behavior and screeds of the anti-Sanders “movement” is disgusting enough without them being complete hypocrites about it as well. You want to talk about bad behavior? How about the physically-aggressive behavior of MSNBC anchor Chris Jansing and her “security detail”  at an event in Detroit, when pro-Sanders podcaster Jack Allison tried to question her about why MSNBC didn’t report about a neo-Nazi who showed-up at the Jewish Sanders’ rally the previous day with a Swastika flag?

The hypocrisy continues since media favorite Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the race; good god, and we still have to endure those ridiculous charges of “sexism”—in the Atlantic Monthly, a female writer says she feels “betrayed” after her husband admitted to voting for Sanders instead of Warren,  outraging her upon the discovery that her husband is a “sexist.” But we have to deal with the now, and at the present time, I’m not prepared to say that Biden is suffering from the onset of dementia any more than Donald Trump is, but it is clear that Sanders is in more control of his faculties than Biden is—as seen in Biden’s gaffefest in St. Louis, when he referred to himself as running for the “United States Senate,” and in effect claiming that half the country had been murdered by gun violence since 2007. Biden backers are even trying to spin his outrageous attacks on people out on the campaign trail as a new “tactic” that will allegedly “appeal” to voters. I’m not sure that calling someone a “horses ass” and threatening to “slap” him even if the man was ill-informed is something Biden wants to be caught doing too many more times; it just shows him to be “out-of-control” with his emotions and lacking in common sense.

Oh how people “conveniently” forget. An article in The New Yorker last August by Eric Lach pointed out that Biden’s habit of groan-inducing gaffes even among his supporters does “matter.” This was a man who bragged about how many immigrants the Obama administration deported, how he was able to work alongside segregationists, and suggested that if you don’t have a college degree, you are pretty much useless in this country. He says things like “We choose truth over facts!” and “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” Biden supporters choose to overlook these “flubs” by pivoting the conversation, like Tim Winter, an Iowa Democratic functionary, tried to do by mentioning Biden’s supposed “good heart” and “caring leadership.” But Lach pointed out that Biden’s “misstatements” were not “obvious truths.” but “ugly confusions, maybe, or embarrassing flubs” which “the press, the public, and even Biden’s surrogates" were forced to spend "a few days searching for the right way to describe them.” How long can this be done without creating doubt in voters’ minds about both the candidate and the media that is trying to keep him afloat?

The upcoming debate between Sanders and Biden in Arizona will likely be the last opportunity Sanders has to demonstrate that he knows his mind better than Biden does, and that is what will be needed to take on Trump. I’m not too confident that will happen, however. I remember the second debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale in 1984, after the first debate brought up the issue of Reagan's mental state; the question among media types was if Reagan, whose habit of forgetfulness and slurring speech when not reading off a teleprompter had grown worse, could even string together one coherent sentence. Apparently he was very well prepared the second time around, because once he did appear to be relatively “coherent”--even joking about making Mondale's "youth" and "inexperience" an issue--the election was over, and Reagan ended-up winning by a landslide.