Less than 18 hours after our report last week Vermont senator Bernie Sanders suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed the candidacy of Joe Biden. The former vice president is now the last man standing in the Democratic field.
This week, former president Barack Obama tweeted out a video endorsing his former VEEP.
In a normal world, the news cycle would be filled with Biden events, Trump events, talk of the coming debates, Biden firing off at Trump and Trump firing back hard and in signature style.
Biden would already be booked on Kimmel, Fallon and Colbert. The Saturday Night Live writers would be hard at work.
All of us in the media would be preparing for the summer’s conventions in Milwaukee and Charlotte.
None of the above is happening.
A search of the Associated Press image bank for a news photo of Joe Biden that is less than a month old yields exactly zero results. Biden has not been seen in public or in person by the media since the last Democratic debate on March 15.
The Democratic National Convention has been pushed back to August 17 from its original July 13 start. The Democrats need a convention much more than the Republicans. The Democrats need the pep rally. They need the primetime television show. They need an energized event to unite the Bernie and Biden wings of the party in order to maximize turnout in November. They need the carefully controlled, carefully staged venue in which to showcase their candidate.
But hanging over that need is the real possibility that there won’t be a traditional convention gathering for the Democrats in Milwaukee. Joe Biden has said so himself.
We’re gonna do a convention. [We] may have to do a virtual convention. I think we should be thinking about that right now.”
At this writing, the Democratic National Convention is just 124 days away. With each passing day spent in social distancing lockdown, it becomes more difficult to picture 20,000 or so delegates, media and hangers on all crammed cheek by jowl into a downtown arena in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Holding such a gathering would be particularly difficult for Democrats if at the very same time they intend to criticize President Trump for “putting profits ahead of people” by reopening the economy too quickly.
It’s a difficult road ahead indeed for Joe Biden.
Which is not to say that it’s a walk in the park for Donald Trump. The roaring economy that all but guaranteed his reelection now lies in shambles. If the lockdown continues for much longer, the record low unemployment of 2019 will be long forgotten and millions of desperate voters will look for anything that might change their miserable status quo.
The media will take its pick of criticizing Donald Trump for damaging the economy by reacting to the coronavirus outbreak too slowly or for causing needless deaths by reopening the economy too quickly.
One can thus only summarize Decision 2020 as it stands on April 15 in the oft-repeated words of Donald Trump himself.
“We’ll see what happens.”