ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA—7:35 p.m.

The most interesting thing about the early going here is not that MSNBC called Virginia for Uncle Joe Biden, although that was fairly startling. The most interesting thing was that, according to the numbers used to call Vermont for Bernie Sanders, Biden—and, perhaps, Elizabeth Warren—were on the verge of scooping delegates in Sanders’s home state. In 2016, Sanders ran up 86 percent of the vote against Hillary Rodham Clinton, who didn’t get a single delegate out of Vermont. If, somehow, Sanders gets held under 60 percent this time around, I don’t think he can pin it on Democratic elites or billionaires.

It’s plain now that, for the moment, anyway, a large part of the Democratic primary electorate is hungering for a president that it can ignore for four or five days a week. One hundred years ago this May 14, Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding gave a speech in Boston that hung a tagline on his campaign forever.

There isn’t anything the matter with world civilization, except that humanity is viewing it through a vision impaired in a cataclysmal war. Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever has rendered men irrational; sometimes there have been draughts upon the dangerous cup of barbarity, and men have wandered far from safe paths, but the human procession still marches in the right direction. America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.



(Quibblers of the day accused Harding of making up a word, but they were wrong.)



I will grant you that the Harding precedent doesn’t bode well for a possible Biden presidency. However, what he’s been pitching ever since South Carolina is essentially the same appeal, with Sanders (and, to a lesser extent, Warren) in the roles of revolution, agitation, surgery, and so forth. It was the theme of all three endorsement speeches presented at the big hootenanny in Dallas; of course, it was Pete Buttigieg’s raison d’etre for his own campaign, so that wasn’t a stretch at all. The comfy shoes are triumphing.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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