Biden Survives, So Biden Wins
By Jim Geraghty
July 31, 2019 11:10 PM
All night long, almost every candidate on stage aimed their attacks at Joe Biden. Early on, Kamala Harris referred to him as “Senator Biden,†a perhaps not-so-accidental demotion. Julian Castro, Bill de Blasio, and Cory Booker all went after him in rapid succession. Even Kirsten Gillibrand claimed that Biden opposed women working outside the home, a particularly implausible accusation.
Here’s the good news for Biden: If tonight doesn’t do any damage to his numbers, he will probably cruise to the nomination. This is life as the frontrunner – you get attacked by everybody, all the time, on any issue that they think will get them some traction. Biden got socked in the jaw in the first debate, lost some ground in the subsequent polls, but gradually floated back to a solid lead. With the vast majority of Democrats living today having voted for him twice as vice president, and generally liking him and not all that bothered by long-ago not-so-progressive positions, all Biden has to do is not fumble.
The weirdest aspect of the attacks on Biden was the suggestion that the Obama presidency was some sort of right-wing nightmare, full of draconian deportation enforcement, Americans desperately yearning for health care and having no way to get it, a Department of Justice that shrugged at police abuses . . . almost everyone assumes that Barack Obama will remain on the sidelines during this primary process. But if Biden is the lone defender of the Obama legacy, and every other upstart is painting the previous presidency as a failure, maybe Obama will come out and formally endorse his old wingman.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/democratic-debate-joe-biden-survives-wins/
