ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA—The great ungainly, blundering Borg called The Democratic Party Establishment seems finally to be getting its act together, and with remarkable speed. In just three days, it has managed to assimilate the campaigns of Tom Steyer, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar, the latter of whom was folded into the Collective early Monday afternoon. Klobuchar immediately endorsed Joe Biden, and was said to be preparing to introduce him at a rally in Dallas Monday night. Reports are that Buttigieg will join them.

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The speed with which the party elites have coalesced around Biden—and the speed with which the elite political media has jumped on board with them—is hardly a surprise. Those groups have suffered from painful Biden Thirst ever since the former vice president first started musing about running last spring. It went unslaked for months, as Biden managed to fritter away much of the eight years of good will he’d built as Barack Obama’s vice president, as well as remind everyone of the guy who’d bungled away two previous presidential campaigns because he often appears to have the brain-to-mouth connection of a car radio stuck on Scan.

(That issue, by the way, persists. Just last week, he pushed a bizarre—and, apparently, completely fantastical—tale about having been arrested in South Africa while trying to visit Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, That’s just completely fcking weird.)

Pete and Amy, together at last. Mario Tama Getty Images

Now, though, with his big win in South Carolina, and with the rising Bernie panic among people who were once merely Biden-curious, Biden has gale-force wind at his back in certain important parts of the party. That may have gained power too late to reach its full potential by Tuesday, but it certainly puts him in a good place in the primaries remaining in March and April. The endorsements are just rolling in now.

The withdrawals of Klobuchar and Buttigieg rather drain all the juice out of the previous narrative. Elizabeth Warren’s attempt to be the Biden-Bernie bridge suddenly has more credibility as the options shrink. She’s the only candidate who, theoretically, can draw voters from both sides of the Democratic divide. The candidacy of Michael Bloomberg’s wallet was completely based on his desire to keep the party—and the presidency—out of the hands of people who might regulate his pals on Wall Street back into their corrals. A rising Biden makes that threat less ominous, and the wallet’s candidacy increasingly pointless.

The conclusive evidence that Biden is on the rise comes to us from Capitol Hill, where the monkeyhouse is warming up for a long season of poo-flinging. From Talking Points Memo:

So the Senate’s Ukraine-Hunter Biden investigation continues, as does former Vice President Joe Biden’s candidacy, which received a weekend boost with a victory in South Carolina and with South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg’s exit from the race. The upshot of the letter is that Sen. Johnson has been fighting to issue subpoenas to former Ukraine embassy in D.C. staffer and Rudy Giuliani buddy Andrii Telizhenko, and to Blue Star Strategies, a D.C.-based lobbying firm that Burisma hired in 2016 to burnish the gas company’s image.

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The missive reveals that Sen. Johnson may be days from sending subpoenas in the probe, saying that he plans to hold a vote to issue the demands for documents and testimony. The issue comes down to testimony from Telizhenko, who has spun unsupported stories since President Trump’s election to the effect that the DNC colluded with the Ukrainian government in 2016 to damage Trump’s candidacy...Telizhenko told TPM that he was a “patriot of Ukraine” and “went through a lot to get the truth to the US authorities.”

“The Democratic Senators and Congressmen call anybody who does not support their views as an intelligence asset, for example the President of United States even though it was proven not true))) (sic),” Telizhenko wrote. “The main issue that it has to be investigated what happened in Ukraine under Obama admin. And if the Dems where not guilty (sic) they would initiate such investigation themselves from the beginning and show what is true and what is not.”

Does Biden have the mental stamina to go through this stuff, and more, between now and November? Does he have the mental acuity to clap back at this debunked nonsense in any way beyond having steam come out of his ears about “insults against my family”? These are not idle questions, nor are they ageist ones. Nominating Joe Biden makes it almost inevitable that some of the presidential campaign will be conducted in the Republican-led Senate, and, if we’re talking about assimilated political collectives, that is the biggest one of all.

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