“Yet Joe Biden is still the favorite to take the same fight to the same man in November. This is a real problem.”
Biden is very unlikely to be the Democratic nominee. His only argument for his own candidacy is Obama nostalgia and “electability.” It would make sense that the latter — which people see as the big one this year — is going to be shot all to hell by his poor showings in the early contests. Admittedly, such assumptions aren’t always safe. He has mostly maintained a lead in the Dem race despite being incapable of forming words into coherent sentences and rarely even seeming to know where he is. It takes money to continue a campaign and the relative handful of huge-money donors on which he depends are going to be paying attention to his poor showings.
Your comparisons with Clinton are largely spot-on. I wrote a fairly long piece on Biden myself that dealt, in part, with the extent to which his campaign has actually been a copy of Clinton’s, down to using the same rhetoric.
Biden also strongly resembles Trump in many ways. His demeanor is often Trumpian — he’s a terrible campaigner. His attack on Medicare For All straight-up copies that of Trump.
