With Bernie Sanders bowing out of the race, President Donald Trump has succeeded in getting the man he wanted to take on in the 2020 presidential race, former Vice President Joe Biden, who has become the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. It is the second consecutive time Sanders, 78, senator from Vermont, ended as runner-up in the Democratic Party’s nomination race.

His elimination from the presidential race comes at a time when his political philosophy and programmes are needed most as the USA is battling the unprecedented coronavirus pandemic. His Medicare for All in place of the broken US model of for-profit health care has resulted in millions of Americans losing their health coverage and exposed them to the deadly coronavirus.

Advertisement

His elimination from the race is going to be a boon to Trump’s re-election campaign. The President and his allies have spent months tarnishing the image of Biden to the point of facing an unsuccessful impeachment bid. Trump considered Biden as his number one political threat. He thanked senate leader Elizabeth Warren for entering the race for Democratic nomination which in his opinion spoiled the chances of Sanders winning the nomination.

Sanders’s advocacy of a $15 per hour federal minimum wage has become necessary in view of growing prices of essential items. Announcing the end of his run for President, Sanders told his supporters that he will keep his movement for democratic socialism alive.

‘Socialism’ is a bad word in American politics. In the electoral history of the USA, no one advocating socialism has ever made it to the White House. In the 19th century, Williams Jennings Bryan, a selfproclaimed socialist, managed to win the Democratic Party nomination for the 1896 election, but he was pipped at the post by William McKinley of the Republican Party.

In the 20th century, George McGovern, another Leftist presidential hopeful, won the Democratic Party nomination in 1972. He was dubbed a Communist and trounced by Richard Nixon of the Republican Party who was eventually impeached.

As the potentially deadly coronavirus sweeps through America and millions of Americans lose their health coverage, Sanders would have been the ideal candidate to take on Trump, but the Democratic Party machinery backed Biden in the hope he could bank on his record as Barack Obama’s deputy and count on the votes of the Afro- American community.

Trump and his supporters, meanwhile, are scrambling to capitalise on the exit of Sanders and the diminished enthusiasm for Biden who ran for the presidency twice before in 1988 and 2008. The President’s re-election campaign is fundamentally a war of attrition, one in which the more they can confuse, confound and dishearten the Democrats, the less they have to worry about Trump’s buffoonery.