It’s been several days since the Democratic candidates’ debate in Las Vegas, but the stench of it lingers still. The worst of it was at the end, when Chuck Todd posed the Todd Test to each of the candidates: If none of you has enough delegates at the Democratic National Convention to clinch the nomination, should the person with the most delegates at the end of this primary season be the nominee even if they are short of a majority?
It should have been a softball question. After all, the candidates had been preaching party unity and the dire need to unseat Trump since the beginning of the campaign. Bernie Sanders, the candidate with the most momentum, said yes. No surprise there. The other five “unifiers” said no! Now, we always hope that the President of the United States will be a person of clear vision and sound judgment, but here we had five aspirants advocating the ruination of their party and four more years of Trump, for that’s exactly what a “Take it away from Bernie” convention would do.
Save for the evisceration of Bloomberg, it was an evening of disappointments. I had long admired Elizabeth Warren. Until last week, this was her pledge: Let’s be clear: I won’t take a dime of PAC money in this campaign. I won’t take a single check from a federal lobbyist, or billionaires who want to run a Super PAC on my behalf. She staked out a moral position, but lately her coffers have been running low. That’s what happens when a campaign wanes and donors turn away. Now, desperate to survive, she’s taking super PAC money because everyone does it. This on top of her willingness to throw the most popular candidate under a bus! She’s like a wax figurine on a hot griddle.
Then there’s Buttigieg, with a memorized stock of idiotic one-liners to use against his rivals … er, I mean “colleagues.” He laid into Klobuchar for a forgivable memory lapse and, much worse, labeled Sanders a “socialist.” No, not a democratic socialist of the kind common in Europe. He was pandering to ignorant Americans who think either “communist” or “ivory-tower fool” when they hear the word. It’s taken decades of patient explaining to give “socialism” the dignity it deservers, yet there was Buttigieg defiling it again.
The rest of the field doesn’t excite me. Biden is pathetic, with his insistence that he’s been a tower of progressive enlightenment for decades. I think of him only as Tonto to Obama’s Lone Ranger. And Klobuchar is almost as sad. I wince every time she reminds us that she’s “in the arena” and brags of her invincibility in Minnesota elections. I’ve yet to hear a compelling reason to vote for her. I leave Bloomberg for last, and for criticism I defer to the others on the stage.
If Bernie goes into the nominating convention with less than a majority of the delegates, I suggest a pre-emptive strike — stern warnings and demonstrations that the Sanders plurality is not to be trifled with.
The Scratching Post 