A political junkie who had climbed into a time machine in September 2019 and emerged from it as the primary results were coming out Tuesday night — with Joe Biden winning in North Carolina as he won in South Carolina on Saturday, and in Virginia, Minnesota and across the Solid South — would not have been surprised at all by the news.
That time traveler would have missed the months since September, during which political junkies saw Kamala Harris and Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke quit the race as Bernie Sanders solidified the left (even after his heart attack) while Elizabeth Warren slowly cratered.
We saw Michael Bloomberg enter the proceedings by tossing thousand-dollar bills into the air like Rip Taylor tossing confetti on “The $1.98 Beauty Show.” And we watched as Biden appeared shaky in several debates and then found himself coming in fourth in Iowa and New Hampshire and a distant second in Nevada.
Those political junkies figured Biden was on the road to oblivion and that Sanders was moving inexorably toward the nomination. But the time traveler would have said, “Wait a minute. Nobody thought Biden would actually win Iowa or New Hampshire. His plan was always to win big in South Carolina and use that to barrel ahead on Super Tuesday.”
The very people who wrote Biden off are now sure that Biden’s comeback is due to the endorsement of Jim Clyburn in South Carolina a week ago and the coalescing of the Democratic establishment behind him in the 48 hours after the South Carolina primary.
Maybe — or maybe it was Biden’s decent debate performances in the preceding days. Fifteen million people saw the South Carolina debate, and 20 million saw the Nevada debate five days earlier.
And it wasn’t just Biden’s work in those debates — Bloomberg’s disastrous debate flopperoos might have convinced the Democrats who were considering a vote for the former mayor to run away from him and right to Biden.
Either way, it looks like Biden didn’t need very much to get himself back on the very same track he had laid out for himself when he started running last April.
If that’s right, then there was never any Biden collapse. What happened to him was a predictable bump on the road.
In fact, the idea that Sanders was uniquely strong might have been the illusion (though I am writing this before the full results in California). After all, Sanders tied in Iowa, he didn’t run away with it. And he won by a mere point in New Hampshire, a state he had won by 30 over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Only in Nevada did Sanders really show strength, and he came out of it so cockily that he airily praised Castro’s Cuba and called Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu a bigot — just at a moment he might have thought it prudent to sound like a reasonable person rather than a caricature of an old Commie.
Let’s turn away from the caricature of the old Commie to the caricature of the wastrel billionaire. Bloomberg spent $17 million on advertising in Virginia and got 9.5 percent of the vote, which means he got no delegates. Biden spent $233,000, received 53 percent and scored 39 delegates.
The same story — millions in spending with bupkis to show for it — was repeated in state after state.
Why am I dwelling on the Bloomberg belly flop? Because there is something contemptuous about his effort to win the Democratic nomination that deserves contempt right back. It was predicated on the high-handed royalist notion that unlimited dollars could take the place of the slow, laborious and necessary work of winning the support of millions of Americans.
Still, let me be the first to congratulate Bloomberg on his triumphant victory … in American Samoa. He won the South Seas homeland of former NFL player Mosi Tatupu. He had seven full-time staffers — yes, I said seven — on the ground there.
Bloomberg has so far spent around $550 million, but he had to go 18 hours away from the American mainland to an archipelago in the South Seas to find a place to win … with — I am not kidding — 175 votes.
Enjoy, pal.