IT DOES APPEAR THAT THE DEMOCRATIC "SEASON OF DREAD" HAS ARRIVED

…Former VP Joe Biden in Las Vegas

The Democratic Party is so confused, it doesn’t know which candidate represents their party…?

The political pundits are writing that for those that are running against President Trump, they have entered the “Season of Dread” for the Democratic Party.

While this is occurring, President Trump is spending his time mocking and bad mouthing the Democrats.  He is especially after them for the failure of the Democrats in Iowa, where they screwed up their own Caucus.

The former poll leader and “inevitable candidate”, Joe Biden’s campaign workers in Las Vegas sounded more like the survivors in a hospitable ward, with the people using words such as: “Resuscitate,”  “Recover,” “Pull through,” and “Survive.”

The real example of how bazaar it has become, a bunch of pigeons wearing miniature Make America Great Again hats were all released from their coops in Las Vegas.  The group responsible for this was a shadowy anti-Democrat group that goes by the acronym P.U.T.I.N. which means: Pigeons-United-to-Interfere-Now.

In the neighborhoods on the northeast side of town, a place where Sen. Bernie Sanders has a strong base of support.  But there are worries that the former New York mayor, Mike Bloomberg, who was unveiled in the top tier with his debut debate appearance, that he could use his vast fortune to just buy the election.

This dread among Democrats is unfolding in full view of their political nemesis, President Trump, who thumbed-his-nose at his would-be opponents by sleeping in luxury at his Las Vegas Trump hotel.

Inside the local mall, a local Vegas lounge singer, Linda Luebeck, and a true Biden fan, found herself a seat.

“I’m worried, very worried,” She said..

On this warm evening, Luebeck is making a little breeze by waving a paper fan bearing a picture of Biden.

“He reminds me of my dad,” she says with a hint of wistfulness in her voice to the woman sitting beside her.

Dad, it turns out, suffered from cancer a few years back in his early 80s.

“I just hope he recovers,” Luebeck says.

But she’s talking about the recovery of Biden’s campaign, not her dad as he had passed away.

To her left, beneath a sign that says “Dim sum daily,” another Biden supporter is handicapping the outcomes.

“If Bernie gets it we’re doomed,” says Theresa “Cheech” Yanni, who owns a business that sells aromatherapy rice bags and doggy bandannas.

She can’t imagine an avowed democratic socialist winning a national presidential election.

On the other hand she says, “if Bernie doesn’t get it we’re screwed,” she frets that the Vermont senator’s supporters won’t vote for the Democrat that might defeat Bernie.

Across town, the voters are also very, very confused.  These voters are lining up outside their union hall as they dig deeper and deeper into the tangle of today's voting guidelines.

A man in a baseball cap is certain that he can name just one candidate on his ballot, however the ballot is basically a list for ranking voting preferences.  He then leaves the second and third choices blank or uncommitted.  All this while another woman in a red union T-shirt thinks she can fill in the same candidate’s name on each line of her ballot.  “I’ve heard people say you can do that,” Shannon Bilbray, a Las Vegas consultant, says with a shrug. “But I don’t know if you really can do that.”

In a strip mall, half an hour from the line of casinos that defines Las Vegas for outsiders, kids are chanting and stomping their feet.  They are all yelling:.

“We have nothing to lose but our chains!”

“Our chains.”

“We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

These teenagers and a few early 20-somethings, the products of the Mexican and Central Americans families that pray the Catholic rosary.  They have found a hero in the white-haired, Brooklyn-born Jew from Vermont who is older than most of their grandparents. 

Some of them are children of deportees, others at risk of deportation themselves.  They get their canvassing assignments in the offices of Make the Road, an immigrant political group. This group has endorsed Sanders, who has been atop the polls here in Nevada, a state with a large Latino population that is the first voting example of that key demographic.

Before they leave to knock on doors, they tell their stories. The teenage girl whose single mom cleaned houses to make ends meet. The teenage boy who once lived in a house with no walls or windows in Mexico, but whose parents named him Kevin Justin.  That was their reference to the American boy-band stars Kevin Richardson and Justin Timberlake.

To them, Sanders represents a kind of ideal future, or at least the promise of something approaching it.  That is, with Sander's advocacy of humane immigration policies, free health care via Medicare-for-all, and free schooling.

They look with questions at their television screens, fat with paid political ads. They’ve heard neighbors and some of their peers opening their minds to Mike Bloomberg and his bottomless financial pockets.

“They keep saying Bloomberg is going to beat Trump to death with his money,” says Ulises Romero, an 18-year-old electrical trade school student whose family is from Mexico.

But as he walks through streets lined by humble houses, some with cars, up on blocks in the driveways, and many with barred windows.  Ulises doesn’t have to do much to sell his candidate Sanders, as Maria Beltran, a woman in an apron who interrupts making a batch of tamales to answer the door.  She proudly declares, “Yo soy puro Bernie,”— I’m pure Bernie.

Across the street they find another Sanders fan in Destiny Armendariz. She’s got $9,000 in student loans but can barely keep up with the loan's interest payments on that debt. Sanders, she hopes, could make all that disappear.

Such hopes worry establishment Democrats who fear Sanders is un-electable in the general election.-

“I for one am increasingly concerned that if Democrats go ahead and nominate Senator Sanders, we will be looking at four more years of the crazy Trump train on steroids,” says Jim Manley.  Manley is a Democratic political strategist who served as communications director for former senator Harry Reid, an unparalleled Nevada kingmaker. “Medicare-for-all is a political loser, as are several of his other grow-the-government ideas like the Green New Deal. Trump will have a field day with him, because no matter what some of his supporters say, we are not, and will never be, a socialist country.”

Harry Reid set the political world ablaze last week when he told The Washington Post that Sanders, or any other candidate, shouldn’t be handed the nomination if he finishes first, but falls short of the required number of delegates.

And so, we have a conundrum, a nagging question rises for Nevada Democrats, the same that is facing Democrats across the nation.  Who to nominate that can beat Trump?

“Donald Trump burned the playbook, and this year the Democrats buried the book's ashes. There’s no conventional wisdom anymore,” says Billy Vassiliadis, the legendary Las Vegas marketing guru whose firm developed the Las Vegas tourism slogan, “What happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas.”

Vassiliadis and his high-powered business friends are worried, he says, that Sanders not only can’t be elected, but if he did, he will then bust the US economy with expensive government programs.

“The party is in the process of figuring out if it is the party of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, or of Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker from California, or even of Barack Obama.  Or is it the party of Pete Buttigieg the former South Bend, Indiana., mayor and top-tier presidential candidate?”  Vassiliadis says, over lunch at his sprawling offices at the foot of Red Rock Canyon. “I don’t think we know.”

The billionaire candidate on the Nevada caucus ballot, businessman Tom Steyer, was not on the latest debate stage.  But the billionaire who is not on the ballot, Mike Bloomberg was there.

On the debate stage, the presence of Bloomberg, who is not participating in the early caucuses and primaries, was not welcome. The five other candidates greeted him in a manner reminiscent of children who don’t want to make room in the sandbox for the new kid who has arrived on the shiniest, fanciest bicycle they’ve ever seen.

Right from the beginning, Sanders blasted Bloomberg on his stop-and-frisk, the law-enforcement policy from Bloomberg’s time as mayor that has been criticized for targeting African Americans.  Minnesota Senator, Amy Klobuchar accused Bloomberg of trying to bully her and the other two moderates onstage, Biden and Buttigieg, to drop out.

Buttigieg was fretful about Bloomberg and Sanders leaving them all in the dust: “Most Americans don’t see where they fit if they’ve got to choose between a socialist who thinks that capitalism is the root of all evil and a billionaire who thinks that money ought to be the root of all power.”

Bloomberg’s halting, widely panned performance did little to stop the interest of the media in the spin room after the debate. They welcome him to the sandbox, jamming seven-deep to listen to Howard Wolfson, a top Bloomberg adviser, do his damage control.

While Wolfson went on, two women with a Biden campaign sign stood alone on the red carpet of the spin room.

“Are you the Biden spinner?” a lanky journalist asks one of them after nearly an hour had passed.

“Ohhhh, no. We’re just waiting. Waiting, waiting, & waiting.”

When Biden’s ever-polished spin-meisters finally arrive, the horde mostly wants to talk about Bloomberg and the rough treatment he got onstage.

Cedric Richmond, the Louisiana congressman and Biden spinner par excellence, pounced on that.

“I will say, ‘Welcome to the party.’ ”

By now, this party should have already gotten down to the last 2 or 3 candidates, not the current plethora of those from Berinie Sanders on one end and Joe Biden on the other, and those multiple candidates in the middle.

It appears that this will all end very ugly for he Democrats.

Copyright G. Ater 2020