Joe Biden Is Going to Ride This Dinosaur Until It Drops Dead Underneath Him

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

08 November 19

Republicans are not going to have an "epiphany" as soon as Trump's gone, and he of all people should know that.

ne thing you have to give Joe Biden. He believes what he believes, even in the face of a decade's worth of political history of which he was a significant part. According to people following him around on Wednesday, at a K Street fundraiser, he said the following things. First, of Senator Professor Warren, he said:

Now the people that are running against me tell me I’m naïve, one said I should be in the Republican primary, God love her. That’s not the way you get things done, man.

And, of the general reason for voting for him, he said:

With Donald Trump out of the way, you're going to see a number of my Republican colleagues have an epiphany. Mark my words. Mark my words.

Mark his words. Then ask Merrick Garland to mark them.

God love him, Joe Biden is going to ride this dinosaur until it drops dead underneath him. Which of "his" Republican colleagues is going to have this "epiphany"? Mitch McConnell? Tom Cotton, who, on Wednesday, started pitching for the next Mexican War? And what will this "epiphany" entail? A move away from radical deregulation and fringe Protestantism? Abandoning, at last, supply-side economics? My guess is that, if and when this administration* ends badly, the Republican Party will find itself compressed into a diamond of pure Id—angry, vengeful, and out for blood. The epiphany is likely to be a fiery reaction against anyone associated with anything these fevered minds believe is "liberal." I could be wrong. The sky could rain gumdrops.

Elsewhere, the biggest campaign news on Wednesday was that Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, endorsed Senator Professor Warren's candidacy. This is not entirely a surprise since they are members of the same congressional delegation. But the other three members of The Squad—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tialib and Ilhan Omar—all previously had endorsed Bernie Sanders, so there was a lot of instant analysis about a "split" in The Squad and, from the Bernie Twitter brigades, several strained efforts to put distance between Pressley and The Revolution as expressed by her three colleagues.

This, of course, terribly underestimates the political maturity of all four of these women, who certainly will work together for their mutual agenda during and after the 2020 election. All of them are too shrewd as politicians to let this come between them. Or, as AOC put it on the electric Twitter machine:

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 6, 2019

Smaht. Wicked smaht.