What’s happened in the swiftly changed dynamic of the presidential race is not fundamentally about the ruling elite --the so-called Establishment — of the Democratic Party, calling the shots for the Democratic base. It’s about both parts of the Mainstream of the Party — the Party’s leadership and its rank-and-file -- working together to accomplish the task we’re most charged to accomplish at this specific dangerous moment.
It’s a moment where the stakes in winning or losing are so huge, that the essential task at hand is getting the powers of the presidency out of the hands of this wrecking-ball President.
The stampede toward Joe Biden represents a collective judgment that the need to win requires us not to nominate Sanders, who’d emerged steamrolling toward the nomination.
That might or might not be a correct judgment, but it is a collective judgment. It is what the biggest part of “Us” believe we need to do.
The false notion that this is about the Establishment reflects an insistence on making the issue between Biden and Sanders into an ideological issue. Of course, there are such differences, but those differences are not what this is about. It’s about what the central task of this moment is: to defeat Trump and to stop the destruction of basic American values.
We’ve all been witnesses of a year-long effort of the main part of the Democratic base to come up with an answer to the question: Which of our candidates is the best bet to defeat Trump? For months, we’ve been hearing that Democrats are struggling with that question, not converging on an answer to rally round.
The stampede to Biden represents the culmination of that effort. It expresses the choice of that Democratic majority once the unfolding of the contest produced clarity about how the desire to win — above all — had to express itself.
Once the answer to the question — “Which of our candidates is the best bet to defeat Trump?” — became clear, the base moved swiftly to put its power behind Biden. Not because Biden was the ideal candidate, but because he was the last potentially victorious alternative to Bernie Sanders. And the Mainstream of the Party decided collectively that nominating Bernie Sanders is not the best bet for preventing Trump from getting a second term that would likely be a national disaster of the first order.
The stampede to Biden has occurred not because the Establishment has turned against an outsider, but because the Democratic mainstream — both leadership and regular voters in partnership — acted on their collective judgment on how to achieve the most necessary task of the 2020 Election: defeating Trump.
One example of theParty leadership playing its part well was the way Jim Clyburn stepped up to that important and pivotal moment and blew on the embers of support and the flames that shot up gave Biden the big victory he needed to propel himself into the big showdown of Super Tuesday.
And then the Democratic base saw what needed doing, saw the solution to the problem they’d been struggling with, and millions of Democratic primary voters moved from other candidates to Biden.
Barring some unexpected development that dramatically alters once again the dynamics of the race, Biden seems surely en route to clinching the nomination, the next task will be to pull the party together.
The necessity of defeating Donald Trump poses two tasks to the Democratic Party:
Choosing the right candidate for that task; and thenMaintaining party unity after that choice is made.In a coming piece, I will share some thoughts about how Biden and Sanders might each contribute to maintaining party unity once the nomination is settled in Biden’s favor.