Opinion: The democratic race has forgotten its purpose

What we had feared the most has come to pass. A senile, raving, gaffe-prone dotard has well-nigh won the democratic presidential nomination to run against Trump in November 2020. At the end of a fratricidal race that pitted candidates without major differences in their policy agendas (with the exception of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) against each other, the contestant who was until recently thought to be the least likely to win the nomination has wound up clinching it. Pundits who wrote off Joe Biden after his poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire can now eat their words.

Even more dispiriting is the fact that Biden crushed Bernie Sanders in Michigan to emerge as the clear front-runner. Sanders’s momentum that seemed to be rife after his stellar performance in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada has fizzled out. The fateful Super Tuesday that tipped the scales in Biden’s favour took the momentum away from Sanders.

What explains Biden’s appeal? Did the democratic electorate genuinely think Biden would be the best candidate to defeat Trump? A man who supported the Iraq war in 2003 and later lied that he did not do so, someone who ‘did not think’ Hosni Mubarak was a dictator, who lied that he was arrested in South Africa, who does not offer any attractive policy on either domestic or foreign policy would be well-positioned to beat Trump? Seriously? Simply put, Biden is uninspiring and represents continuity rather than change. But his victory is due less to his favourability among voters than to their aversion to his opponent, Bernie Sanders. 

Sanders was portrayed by the extreme-right and centre-right media as an extreme socialist who stood no chance of winning the nomination. A flurry of questions were asked regarding the viability of his ‘Medicare For All’ policy. When he proved his critics wrong with impressive victories initially in the race, the naysayers were infuriated. Now, with Biden’s resurgence, the Sanders critics are heaving a sigh of relief.

The persistent hounding of a doughty candidate with a revolutionary agenda and the nomination of a bumbling and incoherent man brings to relief one clear problem with this democratic race: everyone lost sight of the purpose of this whole exercise.

The democratic presidential primary is meant to nominate a candidate who is most capable of defeating Trump in the presidential elections. Its goal is to dislodge a narcissistic, egomaniacal and dangerous person from the seat of power. Rather than focussing on that, the race became a spectacle unto itself. The overarching mindset of experts, media and onlookers became not to get rid of Trump but to get rid of Sanders. Whether he was capable of beating Trump, did not matter. It did not matter either whether the alternative candidate was better positioned than Sanders to beat Trump. They simply wanted Sanders to go. This pathological aversion to Sanders was also demonstrated by candidates who dropped out of the race and pledged their support to Biden, against whom, hypocritically, they had a host of reservations while they were in the race. 

Now that Sanders is really gone, his detractors can rejoice and celebrate. But they have to get ready for another four years of bluster, incompetence, lies and erosion of democratic values.