Joe Who?

Some are discounting this little bit of Joe Biden’s victory speech on Super Tuesday, saying that anyone might have made the mistake of confusing on which side his wife or sister were, since they were standing behind him.

But no, that cannot account for it. He also says, “And I’m Joe’s husband.”

That is, he seems at the same time to confuse himself with his wife.

Not normal, surely. The truth is that Biden, at 77, is senile. This is surely going to become apparent, and may get worse, during the campaign.

And if he becomes president, who is in charge?

Biden's Super Tuesday

Biden.

The Democratic Party establishment seems to have fallen smartly into line to keep Bernie Sanders from winning their nomination. Only secondarily, I suspect, they have thrown the prize to Joe Biden.

They have done this, it is thought, in the cause of electability. That’s pretty much Biden’s only pitch within the party.

I suspect they have the wrong man. I suspect Biden would run worse against Trump than either of the main remaining alternatives, Sanders or Bloomberg.

The political pros usually get one vital thing wrong. They look at the last significant electoral success, and try to imitate it. This means, if they are the party out of power, that they look for a clone of the guy in power, whom they will run against.

The Liberals won with a youthful Trudeau promising “sunny ways.” So the Tories nominated a youthful smiling Scheer.

Always a bad idea, and they always do it. If you like the guy in power, you are going to vote for him, rather than someone who only resembles him. If you dislike him, and are not offered something different, you might just stay at home.

You can trace this through the procession of presidents or prime ministers of the past. Obama was laid-back and restrained in his manner—“No Drama Obama.” Trump is a loud showman. Harper was grey and full of gravitas—so the Canadian electorate went to Justin Trudeau, who promised glamour and excitement. And not to the favoured Tom Mulcair, who was trying to look grey and full of gravitas. Harper, in turn, looked decisive after “Mr. Dithers,” Paul Martin. Obama looked smooth, poised, and articulate after the inarticulate and slightly boorish George W. Bush.

Note that it is more an issue of manner than anything else.

Trump is a clown. Biden is a clown. Trump is a funnier clown than Biden. Biden loses. I think he loses by a fairly large margin.

That doesn’t mean either Sanders or Bloomberg would win, but they would have more upside potential.

If the economy stays good, Trump probably gets the credit, and people will not be inclined to rock the boat regardless.

But what if the economy goes south? It looks as though we may be heading into a world-wide recession. If so, there could well have been an opening for a button-down technocrat type like Bloomberg. There might have been an opening for someone declaring the system flawed and calling for structural change like Sanders.

But do you want to put another clown in charge of an economy gone wrong?

And then, if you have a choice of two clowns, do you pick the prankster type, the one who plays tricks on others and always seems to end up on top? Or do you pick the bumbling clown, who does not seem to understand what is happening around him?

Super Tuesday

Cruzing to victory in Texas and Oklahome

Donald Trump won a lot of primaries, but what stands out to me is that he underperformed the latest polls. It may be that people are finally seeing through the Trump phenomenon, and we may have seen his high water mark. The second story is that Cruz seems to be benefiting more than Rubio. It was always going to be Cruz's night rather than Rubio's, but there was no great Rubio surge. Rubio is the guy who went after Trump, most recently and most impressively, but unless you are Trump and the rules do not apply, going negative tends to blow up both candidates, aggressor and victim. People may buy it, but they do not want to reward anyone they perceive as nasty.

The good news is that Trump's numbers were low enough to make him look quite beatable by a united opposition. His vote was consistently in the thirties percentagewise, with Rubio and Cruz in the twenties. The bad news is that the results made that united opposition look less likely. Cruz edged up to challenge Rubio more definitively for second place. Which one would drop out?

Bernie? Is that your street name?

On the Democratic side, the most marked result is that the Democratic party is split, on racial lines. Blacks are overwhelmingly backing Clinton, by 70 to 90 percent. Whites are backing Sanders. It makes no sense on the face of it, since Sanders has since his youth been a prominent fighter for civil rights, while Clinton comes late to that game, and only when it was in her own interests. This demands an explanation, and nobody has breathed one that might come to the forefront immediately if the racial roles were different. It may have a lot to do with Sanders being Jewish. It may be an endemic black anti-Semitism,

Jews tend to see blacks as fellow sufferers, as like them in being discriminated against. But really, the cases are opposite. Blacks are generally considered inferior. Jews are generally considered superior, and discriminated against out of envy. They are, as a group, significantly wealthier and better educated than the norm for almost any society they are a part of, including the US. For blacks, extra spaces need to be given to them at universities to boost their numbers to their share of the general population. For Jews, quotas have always been the problem, spaces denied them to reduce their numbers to their share of the general population. This sort of thing being so, blacks and Jews really have opposite interests. And, if the average white guy tends to resent the success of the Jews, the average black guy is liable to resent it that much more so.