Joe Biden swept the Democrat Party primary on Tuesday night. He wiped out Bernie Sanders in Missouri (60-34) and also Michigan (52-36), a state in which Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden won Idaho and Mississippi as well, with Washington State too close to call. Sanders won North Dakota. The Vermont Senator gave a defiant speech the day after and vowed to fight on, saying his ideas were being embraced by the Democrat electorate and his campaign is winning the generational debate. If so, that would mean Sanders is winning everywhere but in the voting booth.   Perhaps Sanders can salvage his campaign during the upcoming debate on 15 March.

Sanders would have to change his passive style. After Biden’s victory in South Carolina and Super Tuesday last week, the Vermont Senator needed to fight like a boxer pushed up against the ropes. Sanders needed to take a swing at Biden and punch him in the mouth.  But, Bernie Sanders, who was thrown out of a hippie commune for being too lazy, who never really did anything before becoming mayor of Burlington, Vermont, who accomplished nothing at all in the House and Senate, didn't do anything after Super Tuesday. Instead, Sanders meekly said that if Biden won a plurality of delegates by Super Tuesday, he would accept him as the nominee. He continued defending the literacy programs of Castro’s Cuba and Communist China’s anti-poverty efforts. That’s right. Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the man still thinks communist regimes have some good ideas. These aren’t gaffes.

At the same time, Joe Biden’s campaign is his gaffes. His beleaguered staffers struggle to insulate the 77-year-old from himself. Seemingly every day he makes a horrendous gaffe on stage; forgetting Obama’s name, hideously mixing his name with his former boss’s, ‘I’m an O’Biden-Bama Democrat’ he declared, referring to the Declaration of Independence as ‘You know, the thing!’ Now, he gets into verbal confrontations with voters, telling one to his face that he was ‘full of shi*t’. Joe Biden is past his prime.

For thirty-six years, Joe Biden represented Delaware, the second smallest state in the Union.  Delaware is even smaller than it looks on the map. The state is composed of three counties, a few urban areas in the north, the state capitol in the center, beaches and farms in the south. It is known for favorable corporate tax laws, Dupont, and Purdue poultry. Delaware is the kind of state where every family knows every other family, and everyone knows the politicians. It is a little more than an hour away from Washington DC by train and Biden was known for commuting to work every day. Biden rarely, if ever, had to run a tough reelection race.

Biden was first elected to the senate in 1972. He has been in politics long enough to work with Segregationist senators, who themselves were first elected before the Second World War. Bragging about doing so caused controversy for Biden earlier in the campaign. He opposed forced busing, for which former candidate Kamala Harris blasted him, voted on bills related to the Vietnam War, would have sat in judgement of Richard Nixon had the president not resigned, and was a major player in the Supreme Court nomination wars of the Reagan/Bush era. In the 90’s, Biden was the architect of the Clinton Crime Bill, which modern progressives blame for ‘mass incarceration’ of African Americans.

Biden’s first presidential run was in 1988. He had to drop out because he plagiarized ideas and speeches from Neil Kinnock, the failed leader of the British Labour Party. In 2008, he ran an unremarkable race in a primary which everyone knew the real contest was between Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama. When Obama triumphed, Democrat campaign strategists worried that the former community organizer’s lack of foreign policy experience would be a detriment. So Obama chose Joe Biden, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to be his vice president. Biden met the first rule of vice-presidential picks, do no harm. But he brought nothing to the Obama campaign or administration. Biden’s value to the Obama Administration was that he had no value. Joe Biden is a historical accident.

When not stammering, Biden spent the last debate shouting at reporters and yelling out his resume. And yet, he is saving the Democrat Party Establishment from Bernie Sanders. In his Wednesday press conference, Sanders promised to bring up issues important to the Democrat base at the next debate: bankruptcies, Medicare-for-All, Climate Change, free college and student debt, mass incarceration, illegal immigration, housing and homelessness. ‘Joe, what are you going to do?’ Sanders demanded. This will be the Democrat Party’s first one-on-one debate.  Biden will be all alone up there with Sanders. Let’s see what the two septuagenarians do.