A Gracious and Polite Man Versus an Angry and Defiant Man

Joe Biden won most of the states selecting delegates to the Democratic National Convention this past Tuesday, including the biggest state, Michigan.  Speaking in Philadelphia, Biden, with his wife Jill beside him, said that he wanted to extend a hand to the newer, more diverse generations coming up in the Democratic Party.  He complimented Bernie Sanders for his own presidential campaign and said he wanted to join Sanders supporters in the common goal of defeating Donald Trump. 

And I can count the number of Sanders supporters who were satisfied by Biden's gracious comments on zero fingers.

Yesterday, Sanders emerged to announce his plans for the short term.  Acknowledging his losses in Tuesday's primaries and caucuses, he sounded like he was prefacing a withdrawal announcement with a final show of resistance, in the style of Gary Hart ("I'm not a beaten man, but I am an angry and defiant man").  Well, Sanders let out his anger and defiance, stressing the need to defeat Trump in November and vowing to do what he could to defeat him, but he did not end his presidential candidacy.  Instead he declared that, while he was losing most of the primary elections and caucuses, he was winning the ideological campaign, as the increasing majority of Americans under 50 agreed with his positions on health care, the environment, and economic justice.  And he demanded that Biden answer the question as to what he, as a moderate who sees no reason to fundamentally change the structure of American democracy, what he was going to do about all that.

Sanders might as well have given Biden his briefing book for Sunday's debate - which Sanders says he looks forward to - for all of the advance questions he threw at him.

Well, then, good.  The debate between Biden and Sanders should be the best Democratic debate of the 2020 election cycle.  Not only will it be the first one-on-one debate between the two men, it will be held only with a moderator and possibly a panel, with no audience and no spin room for reporters because of the coronavirus.  That's a good thing.  It will be a classic debate like the old Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960, which also took place without an audience.  It will be a serious discussion between the center-left candidate and the progressive candidate as to where America should go into the 203rd decade of Christendom.  Mano a mano.  Biden versus Sanders.

Sorry, Tulsi.