Now it's Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, heretofore respectful rivals for the 35 to 40 percent of Democratic primary votes who want to go full-bore liberal, who are sniping at each other.
It's what happens 18 days before the Iowa caucuses.
When you're fighting for 35 to 40 percent, you need most of it, not half. If Sanders and Warren split the "populist" base, then Joe Biden can take them out with a modest plurality every time.
Warren was getting the greater share of the populist base for a while and, as a result, burst to first place in polls. But then she faded, and now Bernie rises as Biden's chief rival. That's the way the scale works.
So Sanders' camp happened to mention that Warren had elitist appeal that hampered her connection to common people. She's Harvard, after all, though Oklahoma working class as a child.
Bernie is grass-roots Brooklyn and Vermont with a stop along the way at the University of Chicago, where he was a student activist.
So, in response, Warren said Sanders told her in a supposedly private conversation that a woman couldn't win the presidency. He says he told her only that Trump would relish playing rough with a woman opponent.
I don't know who told whom what or what it would mean if he indeed told her what she says he told her. Would that kind of political analysis make one a male chauvinist pig, to borrow a phrase of my generation that I prefer to today's loosened use of misogynist?
I only know this much: Such a statement would make one analytically wrong. A woman can be elected president and should already have been.
Even an unpopular one, Hillary Clinton, got more votes than the preposterous second-place horse that got taken to the winner's circle in 2016. In fact, Hillary Clinton got more votes for president than any white man ever. Only Barack Obama ever got more.
The Democratic presidential race portends at least four possible scenarios--one a coronation, one we've seen before, one the Democratic version of Trumpism, and the last a gory wreck on the highway that Michael Bloomberg sees in his sweetest dreams.
Here they are:
1: Biden stumbles to narrow first-place pluralities in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, then takes his solid victory in South Carolina and is on his way via coronation.
2: Biden and Sanders split those four states and settle into a two-person race that we've seen before, meaning the one between the party establishment favorite and the more unabashed liberal. You had Al Gore versus Bill Bradley, John Kerry versus Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton versus Sanders. In this scenario, Biden is Gore, Kerry and Hillary, thus the nomination winner and general-election loser.
I tell you that because Sanders would tell you anyway. He'll call it the definition of insanity--doing the same thing over and over again.
3: Sanders goes 3-0, winning pluralities in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada before Biden's firewall in South Carolina, and emerges as the Democratic version of Trump--a crowd-inspiring outsider and independent resisted by the party but unstoppable because he has something conventional Democrats don't, meaning people excitedly for him.
4: Sanders wins one, then Pete Buttigieg wins one, then Warren wins one, then Biden wins South Carolina, and Michael Bloomberg flies over that wreckage in his big jet, saving the day on the basis that the conventional candidates are weak beyond rehabilitation and couldn't possibly beat Trump if they can't beat each other.
Democratic regulars don't like Bloomberg's strategy--or him, much--but they ought to appreciate that his television millions are attacking Trump about as much as they are touting himself.
At least he is running ads about Trump threats to coverage of pre-existing conditions, a winning issue lost in the Medicare-for-all mania in the Democratic primary.
The other factor is the fine mess House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made of the Democratic mad rush to impeach Trump and then sit on the articles so that the trial would take place when the Democrats' presidential candidates who serve in the Senate--Sanders, Warren, and Amy Klobuchar--would be pulled off the Iowa trail for the stretch run.
We still take impeachments seriously enough that senators aren't allowed to skip them.
To be precise: They are allowed to skip them in terms of ethics, integrity and impartiality, and paying attention, but they must physically appear until Mitch McConnell delivers Trump his pre-ordained acquittal no matter what he did.
The thinking is that Biden would benefit by those absences. But Biden's toughest rival has always been himself.
If you leave him an open field in Iowa, he's as apt to fumble out of bounds as prance to a touchdown.
Joe generally does better when not talking, but simply being. He has a compelling essence, but a gift of gaffe.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 01/16/2020