Mike Huckabee: Biden's Resurgence Is Bad News for Bernie
This week was “Super Tuesday 2,” with primaries and caucuses in six states. There’s probably no better way to express just how badly it went for Bernie Sanders and his socialist “movement” in general than to note that the results were so bad, they actually forced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to acknowledge reality.
Best I can tell, that’s never happened before.
At this writing, votes are still being counted, with quite a few still to go in some places. But it looks grim for Bernie. Biden won comfortably by over 6 points in Idaho, and absolutely shellacked Bernie in Mississippi, Missouri and Michigan. Bernie won North Dakota, with Washington state too close to call.
Biden’s win in Michigan was especially devastating. In 2016, Bernie’s campaign was revitalized by an upset win over Hillary Clinton in Michigan, but this time around, he lost to Biden 53 – 36 percent.
Exit polls showed bad news for Bernie and good news for America in general.
First of all, it appears that the bloom may be off the rose that the Democrats were growing in the manure of socialism.
Bernie and his enablers in the media had done a pretty good job of hiding the true nature of socialism (“Oh, no, this is just ‘democratic socialism!’ It means free stuff and caring, with none of the firing squads or rationing! It’s like … Denmark!”).
But when Bernie recently started explaining to us how Cuba is also like Denmark, the rose-colored glasses fell away.
Other good news in the exit polls: Bernie’s base is still mostly the young, far-left college crowd. Leftists think this means they’re the inevitable wave of the future, but I am optimistic that most of those kids will grow wiser as they grow up and look back on their Bernie worship the way children of the ‘80s now turn red-faced over photos of their Flock Of Seagulls hairdos.
For generations, young people have flirted with leftism before going out into the real world and discovering that they’re expected to work and pay taxes for all those programs they thought were “free.”
That problem has a way of solving itself, as evidenced by the quote (misattributed to Churchill) that if a man is not a socialist at 20, he has no heart, and if he’s still a socialist at 30, he has no head. That’s been floating around in various forms since the 1700s.
Another bit of good news: The blue-collar working vote that supported Bernie in 2016 switched to Biden. And no wonder: In 2016, their only other choice was a candidate who openly held them in condescending disdain.
I trust that many of those blue-collar Biden voters are the last die-hard Democrats, while many of their co-workers will be voting for Trump (a lot of yesterday’s Biden voters might be voting for Trump in November as well.)
This bolsters a point I made a few weeks ago: that Bernie’s deflating support was less a sign of the strength of his current rivals (especially Biden) than of just how supernaturally awful a candidate Hillary was.
As I noted during the first caucuses, even Bernie’s early wins were nowhere near his 2016 totals, because back then, the only other choice was Hillary. Just as some wary Trump voters decided to take a chance on a bombastic billionaire businessman rather than cast a vote for her, many Democrats thought, “He’s a cranky old socialist with crazy ideas that would destroy America — but at least he’s not Hillary.”
It’s a comforting thought to consider that there really aren’t as many Americans as we thought who are actually falling for the siren song of socialism.
Maybe they were just willing to risk voting for anybody who wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Bernie was that day-old tuna casserole you try to choke down when the only other choice on the menu is the week-old kale salad.
There’s supposed to be another debate, and there are more primaries to come, but Democratic Party powers are pushing Bernie hard to drop out and face reality (being a socialist, he’s had a lot of practice at resisting facing reality) so they can dispense with all that “democracy” jive.
The next primary states are not good for Bernie anyway (Florida, anyone?), and the party establishment wants to get down to the serious business of “Biden” their time and hiding Joe from the public until after the election so he doesn’t have any more Grandpa Simpson moments (like this one).
(It should be noted that not only was his pugnacious, foul-mouthed lashing out at a voter worrisome in itself, but everything Biden so emphatically said was demonstrably incorrect, from claiming he never said he’d take away guns to calling AR-15s “AR-14s.”)
This is why some Bernie supporters are urging him to stay in the race, in case Biden’s behavior worsens and can’t be hidden. They even pointed out that Biden appeared to forget which office he was running for during a victory speech in Michigan.
And even his 25-second recorded victory message required several edits.
I suspect that for the debate with Trump, they’ll insist on doing it by satellite TV (to avoid the coronavirus! Yeah, that’s the ticket!).
They can call on their Hollywood supporters to provide the same “youthening” CGI effects used in Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” to make Joe look like a fresh-faced lad of 65 again, and get a celebrity impersonator to dub in some lucid responses. They could even call it “The Irishman 2.”
Put it on pay-per-view and it might actually turn a profit, as long as they let Trump produce it.
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