Biden's primary success is undeniable — and ridiculous

The people have had their say, haven't they? Primary results are still too close to call in Washington state and North Dakota, but the evidence is unmistakable: The overwhelming majority of Democratic primary voters in this country want Joe Biden, who now has a 99 percent chance of winning the nomination, to face President Trump in November. On Tuesday in Michigan, a state Bernie Sanders won in what ended up being the greatest upset of the 2016 primary campaign, they chose the former vice president in every single county, from Detroit and Grand Rapids and Flint to the Keweenaw Peninsula, one of the remotest parts of the continental United States.

What does this tell us? Given a choice between the Vermont senator politely suggesting that the world's wealthiest country just might be able to afford things like single-payer health care and university education that does not require 18-year-olds to become indentured servants, and the former vice president who routinely fantasizes about attacking the current president and threatens random voters with violence and reminisces about his long and non-existent career as a civil rights activist, voters prefer the latter without hesitation.

They want to spend hundreds of hours of their lives figuring out the difference between the Bronze Choice Care Plus Advantage Plan and the Silver Choice Care Advantage Plus Plan and the Gold Advantage Choice Care Plan (Plus). They want young people who are required to earn meaningless pieces of paper in order to secure gainful employment to take out what are effectively mortgages at the age of 18. They want the lifelong stooge of the credit card companies, who incidentally awarded his son a five-year consulting agreement.

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They want our foreign policy in the hands of a man who was pushing for an invasion of Iraq all the way back in 1998, who has lied so many times about his record on this issue that he probably doesn't even remember what he believed or when, much less care. They want to entrust civil rights to the fabulist who makes up stories almost daily about sit-ins and arrests in South Africa, the architect of criminal justice polices so brutal and counterproductive that even Donald freaking Trump reversed them on the advice of Mrs. Kanye West. They are totally okay with entrusting their electoral fortunes to a candidate whose behavior on the campaign trail and in debates suggests serious cognitive decline.

This is not a caricature. It is not an unfair decontextualized summary. It is a straightforward description of what it means to reject Sanders by enormous margins in state after state, in the Northeast, the South, and now the Midwest. The question is why it has happened. Are Democratic voters really terrified of "socialism," i.e., being slightly to the right of all of Europe's far-right political parties on economic issues? Are they driven mad with terror at the thought of letting the bad orange man be in charge of their stock portfolios for another four years? Are they salivating at the prospect of having the skateboard guy who allegedly fed his wife poop once responsible for gun policy?

I for one have a hard time believing this, but all the evidence suggests that it must be true. If instead of the one-time frontrunner in this race, Sanders had been a second-tier candidate who struggled to get two minutes of speaking time in televised debates, it would be easier to reject the theory that voters simply preferred Biden.

But the conclusion is unavoidable. It is also unbelievable, a joke with no punch line.

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