Roll away the stone:
Joe Biden bounces back
Except ... there was a slight problem: Nobody told the guest of honor he was supposed to be dead.
Thus misinformed about what was supposed to be happening to him, the former vice president wandered into the Super Tuesday Democratic primaries on March 3 and ran the table, rewriting the playbook of how to wage a presidential campaign that makes full and effective use of the vice-presidential brand -- and in the process conducting what is, to this point, the most cost-efficient presidential campaign in American history.
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South Carolina, however, just turned out to be another matter entirely. The South Carolina primary, on Saturday, was considered the first real canvass of the national mood by people that looked like the national population. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, the state’s revered Democratic congressman, put it all together when he publicly endorsed Biden in a 21st-century speech that resonated in a brilliantly old-school way.
With that speech, Clyburn wielded the defibrillator paddles that shocked a moribund Biden campaign back to life.
But Clyburn did more than that. He was the first in the 2020 campaign to wield the collective objectives and aspirations of African Americans on behalf of Biden. What Clyburn tapped into was bigger than South Carolina.
Coming before Super Tuesday, his speech was ready to be deployed to achieve at least a regional objective, and it was. But it had a deeper, wider resonance; its reach for the homiletic rafters of the civil rights era was as inescapable as it was undeniable.
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IT READS LIKE music. A dozen words, four measures of three notes each. “I know Joe. We know Joe. But most importantly, Joe knows us,” he said. With those 12 words, Clyburn certainly set the stage for resetting the race for the Democratic nomination, and possibly relit a fire under the Obama-Clinton coalition of voters that prevailed in 2008 and 2012, and whose younger, more progressive cohort kicked ass in the 2018 midterms. His statement reflected a serious grasp of retail politics at its basic level.
The questions “Who do you trust?” and “who do you know?” have been asked and answered; they’re foundational to much of how politics works. Clyburn’s statement answered the questions we don’t ask often enough in our elections: “Who knows us, and how well?” “Who gets me, and my life, where I live?”
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren had gone to lengths greater and lesser to yoke Biden and his campaign to rich donors, the billionaire class, and “the establishment” writ large. But that’s not what people took into the voting booths in 14 states and American Samoa on Super Tuesday, March 3. They remembered what Clyburn said. And they mostly remembered the best of the previous 11 years of their lives, and what Joe Biden had to do with those years, and what Joe Biden had to do with the last president they could get their hearts around.
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WHEN THE smoke cleared, Biden had cornered the Lazarus franchise. He was the comeback kid on steroids. Ten out of 14 states — Alabama, Arkansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia — went for Biden over Sanders; former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg won American Samoa. Biden convincingly beat Warren in her home state, an embarrassing defeat.
Biden won panoramically, in the west and the north, and sweeping the southern states. Biden won on Super Tuesday with the kind of broad, ecumenical, expansive support that could legitimately form the basis of — what’s Bernie’s favorite word? — a movement.
Its origins are populist enough. For all the billionaires that Sanders claims are aiding Biden’s campaign, the ones who put him over the top on Super Tuesday were everyday people, ordinary taxpaying citizens who signed on to something they could believe in. Like the people who just dropped $9 million on the Biden campaign.
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And Biden won another victory March 3: a win over the expectations of the Sabbath gasbags and others in the punditburo who equalized money and electoral credibility. Credibility is often its own currency, and maybe the best there is. Biden won on Super Tuesday in states he didn’t even campaign in. No offices. No field people. No ground game. No interns gobbling takeout pizzas and mainlining lattes.
Biden did it all with next to no money in a highly competitive tranche of crucial primary states. For example: According to WBUR, Biden only spent about $89,000 in Texas, “compared with more than $3.7 million from Sanders.”
It was an amazing levitation, but one that wasn’t based on smoke or mirrors or magic. Biden soared over the field because, in a time of vast uncertainty about who and what our leaders are, what they claim to stand for, Biden was that most comfortable thing for voters: a Known Quantity. They knew him. And Joe knew them too.
◊ ◊ ◊
The questions “Who do you trust?” and “who do you know?” have been asked and answered; they’re foundational to much of how politics works. Clyburn’s statement answered the questions we don’t ask often enough in our elections: “Who knows us, and how well?” “Who gets me, and my life, where I live?”
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren had gone to lengths greater and lesser to yoke Biden and his campaign to rich donors, the billionaire class, and “the establishment” writ large. But that’s not what people took into the voting booths in 14 states and American Samoa on Super Tuesday, March 3. They remembered what Clyburn said. And they mostly remembered the best of the previous 11 years of their lives, and what Joe Biden had to do with those years, and what Joe Biden had to do with the last president they could get their hearts around.
◊ ◊ ◊
WHEN THE smoke cleared, Biden had cornered the Lazarus franchise. He was the comeback kid on steroids. Ten out of 14 states — Alabama, Arkansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia — went for Biden over Sanders; former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg won American Samoa. Biden convincingly beat Warren in her home state, an embarrassing defeat.
Biden won panoramically, in the west and the north, and sweeping the southern states. Biden won on Super Tuesday with the kind of broad, ecumenical, expansive support that could legitimately form the basis of — what’s Bernie’s favorite word? — a movement.
Its origins are populist enough. For all the billionaires that Sanders claims are aiding Biden’s campaign, the ones who put him over the top on Super Tuesday were everyday people, ordinary taxpaying citizens who signed on to something they could believe in. Like the people who just dropped $9 million on the Biden campaign.
◊ ◊ ◊
Biden did it all with next to no money in a highly competitive tranche of crucial primary states. For example: According to WBUR, Biden only spent about $89,000 in Texas, “compared with more than $3.7 million from Sanders.”
It was an amazing levitation, but one that wasn’t based on smoke or mirrors or magic. Biden soared over the field because, in a time of vast uncertainty about who and what our leaders are, what they claim to stand for, Biden was that most comfortable thing for voters: a Known Quantity. They knew him. And Joe knew them too.
Image credits: Biden: Reuters/MSNBC/NBC News. Clymer: CBS News.
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