I guess the breadsticks are OK

The always-excellent Lili Loofbourow gets to the heart of the matter:

Biden isn’t just a literal return to a Democratic status quo; he is, at this point in his life, its oldest and least competent version. Many are speculating—as if it would console or ameliorate the fact that the worst person for the job inexplicably got it—that Biden might appoint a competent woman of color for his vice president. It’s also true that this fight isn’t over; Sanders might claw back some support if his campaign manages to learn any lessons at all from the Super Tuesday results. But if it doesn’t, Biden is it: the least agile thinker, the least fluent talker to appear on that stage will run against an even more incompetent incumbent. If he wins, Biden will break the record for oldest man to be sworn in as president of the United States. (Donald Trump holds that title now.) If he loses to a president who has literally been impeached, it will be easy to see why: He’s in decline. Biden’s liabilities aren’t just the scorn with which he’s dismissed the concerns of the sizable demographic currently powering Sanders’ campaign, or his refusal to take seriously women’s discomfort at his massages and hair-smelling, or that he made up an outrageous lie about getting heroically arrested while trying to see Nelson Mandela; it’s that anyone who has watched Biden speak can attest to the fact that the man speaks in fragments that jostle into an agrammatical approximation of sense.

It’s true that this may not matter: Trump speaks this way too, only worse, and Biden has at least spent a career adapting the public to his “gaffes.” Trump’s bad temper is worse than Biden’s, and he certainly knows less. Trump is creepier than Biden; on that front, there’s no contest.

But what an unappealing contest it would be.

Biden might coast to victory on a wave of voters who can’t take Trump anymore and find the former vice president to be the closest thing to a “generic Democrat” on offer. No one can really say what Biden is for, but his Democratic credentials are clear, and that plus name recognition has obvious appeal for a subset of voters—even without a ground game, or much fundraising, or many interviews, or a memorably staked-out position on anything at all, Biden has floated through these primaries with peculiar ease. I wrote, back in January, before his prospects briefly dipped, that Biden’s success might be explained as a kind of “politics of exhaustion”: There is a part of the American electorate that’s just tired, and tired of being tired. The unrelenting political news cycles of the past few years have burned them out and depressed them and angered them, and all they want is to tune out and put someone even notionally acceptable in charge. It may even work to Biden’s advantage that he and Trump both speak a strange kind of stream-of-consciousness Americanese. Their sentences are less sentences than snatches of songs whose choruses their supporters can sing along to. Yes, their debates will be so loud and untethered from the questions they’re asked that transcripts will baffle future historians. It doesn’t matter.

My only quibble with this is that I have some doubts about whether there would be any debates, as the camps of both candidates will probably be eager to avoid them. If they happen, it will be because these two increasingly incoherent very old men will insist on inflicting themselves on everyone in what promises to be the worst reality TV show ever. [alanis gif]

Our of morbid curiosity, I went back this morning and reviewed every substantial post an LGM front pager has made about Biden over the past (endless) two years. Collectively, they read like the most comprehensive indictment of a candidate one can imagine. It’s clear that, for the LGM Collective, Biden was the very last choice in a huge field, excepting the obvious joke candidacies — Gabbard and Williamson — at least until Mike I Guess It Could Always Be Worse Bloomberg jumped into the fray. So thanks for that Mike.

Yeah, I know, the only thing that really matters ultimately is beating Trump; Biden, or hopefully his wife, will choose lots of competent people for key positions; Sanders and his whole team have been busy making asses of themselves for quite awhile now, to the point where even non Sanders stans who have greatly preferred him to Biden are questioning that preference; Elizabeth Warren and all the (large number of) candidates who were preferable to both were always non-starters because if there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last few years is that we can’t have nice things; lemons, lemonade etc.

But really? I was a law student when Biden’s first presidential campaign collapsed in a farcical heap 33 (!) ago, in the summer of 1987. If somebody had told me then that a third of a century later I would be witnessing a presidential election between Biden and Donald Trump I would have walked out of the theater and asked for my money back.

Here we are now, entertain us.