Biden is a Weeble who wobbles but won’t fall down (March 2):
Get up, Joey! If someone knocks you down, get up. Get up, Joey, get up!
Throughout former Vice President Joe Biden’s career, he has repeated these words of advice from his father countless times. It is almost surely Biden’s favorite mantra. Both personally and professionally, he indeed has gotten up from the mat again and again. Now, just when know-it-all pundits (such as I) pronounced his political career finally over, Biden has dusted himself off and, yes, gotten up.
His landslide victory in the South Carolina primary last Saturday may be the most dramatic political (but not personal) rebound of Biden’s life. It continues one of the most remarkable careers in American political history. It’s a career forged by a man with exuberantly contradictory character traits: candor and blarney, kindness and callousness, idealism and cold pragmatism. He’s irrepressible, inexhaustible, sometimes insufferable, and sometimes irresistible…. [For the full columns here and in the two below, follow the links embedded in each separate headline.]
Explaining ahead of the primary why James Clyburn’s endorsement would revive Biden (Feb. 26): Rep. James Clyburn’s endorsement of former Vice President Joe Biden for president is a big deal. It could be the most consequential endorsement since Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama against Hillary Clinton in 2008.
Conventional wisdom in the last quarter century or so has gone from holding that political endorsements matter a lot to holding that they matter not at all. The truth is in between: Endorsements don’t matter, except when they do. That of Clyburn, the longtime congressman from South Carolina and the highest-ranking black elected official in either party, is one that matters so much that it could hand the Democratic nomination, and eventually the presidency, to Biden….
As a ‘white Obama,’ Buttigieg paled in comparison (Feb. 27):
Pete Buttigieg is about to find out that when the reality of a candidacy is even worse than the caricature of it, the candidate is in big trouble.
Saturday Night Live’s Feb. 8 opening included a mock debate segment (see from 8:25 to 8:37 here) in which the fake Buttigieg admits that he “sounds like a bot that has studied human behavior by watching a hundred hours of Obama speeches. So let’s get #WhiteObama trending — and please, please not ironically.”….
