Thank you for continuing your habit of being the guy who most often says publicly the kinds of things that most senior officeholders and candidates keep private including, recently, the following (in my interpretation and paraphrasing):
Thank you for confirming that:
insiders are now telling each other 'we'd better pay attention to what that populist guy Sanders is saying about inequality--even if only to locate the Left side of bargaining ranges'
(which was the first goal of Sanders' campaign).
Thank you for confirming that:
at least you, among insiders, is now saying 'we realists need to recognize that the populist guy Sanders is correct and not radical about inequality'
(which was the second goal of Sanders' campaign).
Thank you for waiting and seeing whether you will become a candidate for President. To me, the key takeaways from this are:
• Joe will only run if Hillary’s polling and funding collapses, which is very unlikely.
• Joe will not run merely to give the establishment a new line of attack against Bernie.
• Joe will not cooperate in muddying the clear two-sided policy debates that are enabled by Hillary’s and Bernie’s joint dominance of polling, and would continue to be enabled if self-defined 'realist-not populist' Joe replaced Hillary as the establishment’s candidate.
• Joe has undermined the credibility of the short debate calendar’s “unchangeability” by refusing to allow it to dictate the timing of his decision.
• Joe continues to suck up all the early oxygen (MSM attention) that might have been available to any other “anybody-but-Bernie” candidate(s).
In the unlikely event that Joe replaces Hillary as the establishment candidate, whether Joe’s platform is pure Obama-Hillary, or takes advantage of late-entry to co-opt much of Bernie’s platform, I look forward to less risk of distraction from a substance-focused policy debate. If Bernie wins this debate and the majority of voter-selected delegates, especially by defeating 'impossible-to-hate Joe', then I look forward to a convention, nomination process and general election free from any attempts to justify non-unity by excuses such as allegations that support for Bernie in the primaries was motivated by irrational hatred of Hillary.
BTW, Joe's 'break up Iraq' proposal of some years back, which was derided as unthinkable, now looks like it probably would have worked out better than whatever-the-hell is going on now. This suggests that Joe is relatively open to replacing old political paradigms, as this 2 day-old diary recommended that Hillary do. Any late-entry by Joe into the race would leave him freer, than the long-running Hillary, from the concern to "not appear vacillating", which may constrain Hilary's ability to reposition as dramatically, as new generations of actual and potential voters react to these changing, and ever-more-frightening, times.