Mr. Luce’s almost prophetic gifts are demonstrated, in these two paragraphs of his latest essay:
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Joe Biden’s victories in at least four of the six states that voted in this “mini-Super Tuesday’ — four of which Mr Sanders had won in 2016 against Hillary Clinton — puts the former vice-president into an almost prohibitive lead.
Next week’s delegate-rich Florida primary could put him beyond reach. The real question is how long before Mr Sanders bows to the inevitable, and on what terms. On that fraught negotiation — Mr Sanders’ price for endorsing Mr Biden — will hang the unity, or disunity, of the Democratic party.
And then there is this:
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There is no evidence Mr Biden is suffering from anything other than ageing combined with a life-long stutter. To minimise the opportunities for gaffes — or “Bidenisms” — his aides have sharply curtailed his public addresses to a few minutes.
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In the Sunday Times, another Biden Apologist, Niall Ferguson:
Headline: Sleepy Joe Biden has given Donald Trump a wake-up call
Sub-headline: Despite his senior moments, the comeback codger has a real shotI know Joe Biden. Not well, but well enough to have had a good chat when we ran into one another at the Irish embassy in Washington on St Patrick’s Day last year. I must also confess to rather liking Biden. In 2015 I argued that he would win if he ran the next year. He would certainly have been a more engaging candidate than Hillary Clinton, especially in those key states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that carried Donald Trump to the White House.
A veteran professional politician of the homely, Irish-American, middle-class, press-the-flesh variety, Biden overcame personal tragedy (the 1972 car accident that killed his first wife and daughter and seriously injured his two sons) to become the reassuringly conventional vice-president to Barack Obama — not only the first black president but just 47 when elected. Because, folks, Biden is exactly what central casting used to think a US president should look like.
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Mr. Luce, like his Neo-Liberal fellow travelers , can’t face the fact that ‘The Chosen One’ Biden has an actual cognitive deficit. But in what he conceives to be a compelling argument, masked by Biden’s ‘stutter’ , or just his ‘sleepiness’? , the Corona Virus Crisis offers a weak kind of political opportunity, to deflect from the glaringly obvious! Undaunted, Mr. Luce political speculation, carefully embroidered as it might be, reads as just that!
Let me speculate about a political scenario : what happens when candidate Biden , in a debate with Trump, experiences the confusion of a man, unable to articulate a rational argument, to one of Trump’s challenges? Or, could this moment occur in a debate between Sanders and Biden? when the viewers will see, with stunning clarity, the cognitive impairment of Biden? The current mythology is that Biden overcame a stutter, and these lapses are just a nagging re-occurrence. Yet there is video evidence that renders this claim dubious, to say the least.
Like a contemporary Tiresias , Mr. Luce ends his defense of Biden:
All of which puts a very different gloss to the customary “stakes are high” election clichés. Welcome to a presidential campaign about the candidates’ sanity. Welcome also to politics in a time of contagion.
Political Observer
https://www.ft.com/content/8851c8f2-62fd-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6a68
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