Soleimani's killing and the prospect of war with Iran have given Bernie Sanders an opening to hammer at a pillar of Biden’s 2020 rationale
The bus formerly known as “No Malarkey” was rolling east through the darkness along Iowa’s Route 20 whena senior foreign policy adviser stretching back to Biden’s days in the U.S. Senate, was on the phone to deliver stunning news: A drone strike in Baghdad had just killed Qasem Soleimani, a top Iranian general and the powerful architect of decades of lethal attacks in the Middle East. In all probability Soleimani’s death had been the work of American special operations forces.
“We’re in this moment on Iraq where that fundamental flaw—I don’t want to get too soft here—that fundamentalin judgment by Joe Biden and many other establishment politicians has continued to remind people of what a disastrous mistake that 2002 vote was,”Sanders’s campaign manager, told me shortly after the Soleimani news broke.
will determine if it becomes a higher priority over the next few weeks. Then the question will be whether centrist voters are drawn even tighter to Biden as a generally reassuring presence in a looming crisis, or whether they’re outnumbered by leftish voters on guard for any appeasement of Trump. “The debate around Trump needing authorization to conduct further tit-for-tat with Iran could become a fault line in the primary,” saidwho was a top strategist for Clinton in 2016.
The Biden camp continues to sound confident, with public polling and fundraising numbers rising just as the first actual votes are finally within sight. “After a period of trying on other candidates for size, we’re seeing voters who are coming home to Biden here in the final crunch because the stakes in the election are so high,” a top Biden adviser told me. “Donald Trump has spent the duration of this race attacking Biden viciously, attacking his family, getting himself impeached over it.
The Biden adviser scoffed. “Voters saw him for eight years in the White House, shoulder to shoulder with President Obama, handling crises on the world stage. If you put the sum total of Biden’s 40 years of foreign policy experience and leadership on the table next to Bernie Sanders’s record, which is essentially nonexistent, I think it speaks for itself,” the aide said. “Biden can build a coalition to get things done.
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