In 1099 AD, during the early days of the Spanish Reconquista, the Christian statesman and general Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (aka El Cid) died of illness while defending Valencia from the Moors. As the battle raged and with their Hero dead, the surviving nobles inside the walls desperately needed to find some way to rally their dispirited troops for one final charge to break the siege and relieve the city.

And so, as the legend tells, Rodrigo's wife Jimena ordered the corpse of El Cid to be mounted in full battle dress on his faithful steed. The animal was then sent galloping straight at the Moorish lines. The Valencia troops, stunned out of their apathy by the seeming miracle of a resurrected El Cid, instinctively followed the warhorse into battle and won a smashing victory before anybody on either side realized the guy leading the charge wasn't actually sentient.

900 years later on Super Tuesday 2020, El Cid rode again.

Let's all step back from the cacophony of up-is-down beltway punditry and Progressive Twitterati garment rendering for a moment and realize that what we've witnessed since Super Tuesday is not the assertion of overwhelming political establishment might smiting an insurgency candidacy to smithereens, but rather the desperate act of a collapsing party aristocracy consolidating its forces in a last ditch attempt to preserve its elite privilege by any ghastly means necessary.

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Stop Bernie Plan A: Lord of the Flies

The elevation of Joe Biden as the single establishment-approved candidate to face Bernie was an act of improvisation. It was NOT the result of some long thought out master plan. On the contrary, all the way up to even the weekend before Super Tuesday, the Stop Bernie Plan A had been quite the opposite: flood the field with marginal candidates to dilute the Bernie vote within targeted states, which would then prevent him from attaining an overall delegate majority nationwide.

With only a plurality at the Convention, Bernie would be unable to secure the nomination on the first ballot, opening up the choice of nominee on the second ballot to unelected superdelegates who, with the support of establishment-backed elected delegates, could select a compromise nominee who in turn (and this is the clever bit) would not necessarily have to actually have been one of the candidates in the race.

As NBC News telegraphed back in early 2019, Plan A's goal was to create a 'Lord of the Flies' scenario:

Why the 2020 Democratic primary could turn into 'Lord of the Flies'

If several candidates run deep into the race, the competition for cash and delegates could turn brutal, according to Jeff Berman, who devised delegate strategies for Barack Obama in 2008 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 and helped rewrite the party’s nominating rules.

...“With up to 15 or 20 viable candidates, there is a real chance no one gets a majority on the first ballot — or, worse, that three or four candidates could make the case that they should be the nominee,” said Chris Kofinis, a longtime Democratic strategist and public opinion researcher. “In that case, it’s Thunderdome politics at its worst, with superdelegates playing king- or queen-maker.”

As one might imagine, Plan A is tailor made for a party honcho like Hillary Cinton looking to muscle Her way into the nomination through the superdelegate back door.

Conversely, Plan A is also useful for a party honcho like Barack Obama looking to play kingmaker by withholding enough establishment delegates to force a three way standoff.

Plan A is NOT helpful to an establishment outsider like Bernie Sanders who receives the most elected delegates but still does not win the nomination. Taking Mr. Berman's 'Lord of the Flies' scenario to its logical conclusion, come the final Convention battle, the Bernie campaign meets the same gruesome end as Piggy.

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The 2020 Candidate Map

The competition between the Clinton and Obama wings of the Dem establishment exacerbated the flood of marginal candidates into the primary race, as both establishment power centers supported large stables of hopefuls recruited from states where Bernie performed well in 2016.

Here is my chart of 2020 the Dem primary candidates and likely affiliations superimposed over a Wikipedia map of the 2016 Dem primary results (click pics for larger).

Now here is an NYT map of the relative margins of victory per county in 2016.

Taking the two maps together, we see that most of the Hillary and Obama backed candidates in 2020 come from states where Bernie either won or came close in 2016, with one notable exception in Texas where Team Obama, sensing a chink in Team Hillary's 'solid south' armor, ran both Beto and Castro to siphon off Hillary and Bernie votes in that delegate rich state.

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"You don't have to do this, Joe. You really don't."

The other notable exception to the Plan A strategy of running marginal candidates in Bernie states is, of course, Joe Biden. Unlike all of the other establishment-backed candidates, Biden is a honcho in his own right, and his status as party elder meant he was not dependent on either the Obama or Hillary power centers to sustain his candidacy.

While running as an Obama Democrat, Biden also shares longstanding relationships with party leaders in Hillary circles, leaving Joe as the only establishment-backed candidate with the relative freedom to chart his own path to the nomination independent of the whims and circumstances of the two competing party bosses.

And that's where it all went wrong for Plan A.

Biden's relatively late entry into the race threw the carefully negotiated candidate schemes of the Obama and Hillary camps into disarray, as Joe's senior party status and easy access to establishment support scared off a number of marginal candidates who would have been far more willing to entertain a run at the nomination without Biden in the race.

Indeed, within a few weeks of Joe's passable performance at the 2-day beauty contest debate in late July, Hickenlooper, Inslee, Moulton, and Gillibrand all abruptly dropped out citing lack of support. Most of the rest of the original establishment candidate crop would soon follow, leaving Warren, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar as the only potentially viable candidacies to welcome in the New Year.

As the candidate carnage continued, Obama himself sounded the alarm about Joe's candidacy, dishing dirt in the New York Times about how Joe really wasn't his first choice for VP in 2008 (Tim Kaine) and suggesting that he had tried before to discourage Joe from running before Joe announced in April.

The two men spoke at least a half dozen times before Mr. Biden decided to run, and Mr. Obama took pains to cast his doubts about the campaign in personal terms.

“You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Biden earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the exchange.

Mr. Biden — who thinks he could have defeated Donald Trump four years ago — responded by telling Mr. Obama he could never forgive himself if he turned down a second shot at Mr. Trump.

In the article, Obama went so far as to blatantly question Joe's electability as well as publicly fret about Joe tarnishing his legacy:

He has communicated his frustration that Mr. Biden’s closest advisers are too old and out of touch with the current political climate — urging him to include more younger aides, according to three Democrats with direct knowledge of the discussion.

In March, Mr. Obama took the unusual step of summoning Mr. Biden’s top campaign advisers, including the former White House communications director Anita Dunn and Mr. Biden’s longtime spokeswoman, Kate Bedingfield, to his Washington office for a briefing on the campaign’s digital and communications strategy with members of his own staff, including his senior adviser, Eric Schultz.

When they were done, Mr. Obama offered a pointed reminder, according to two people with knowledge of his comments: Win or lose, they needed to make sure Mr. Biden did not “embarrass himself” or “damage his legacy” during the campaign.

By early January, with Bernie Sanders surging in polls of early primary states and Biden taking a big chunk out of Pete Buttigieg's numbers, Obama's ongoing frustration with Joe's run led him to issue a blunt warning:

[O]ne Democrat, who is neutral in the 2020 race, shared details about a candid conversation with Obama. Apparently concerned about his former vice president’s “gaffe-prone nature,” Obama allegedly told the unnamed Democrat the following.

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*ck things up.”

As of the time of this writing, Barack Obama has yet to endorse Joe Biden for President.

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Warren v. SpiderMike

Team Hillary suffered similar ill effects from Joe's run, with Her stable of candidates left as bereft of strong big donor support as Obama's was. Significantly, Hillary's attempts to float a Warren trial balloon to high dollar turncoat GOP donors in September crashed and burned with a resounding 'NO!' from the NeverTrumpers.

The candidate they liked better? Joe Biden.

A few Republicans opposed to Trump are prepared to support Warren if she emerges as the only viable challenger, affirming a commitment to topple the president at all costs. But for many well-known Republicans and unaligned political operatives inside the community of conservative Trump opponents, there are limits. Joe Biden, the former vice president, is a traditional labor Democrat they can stomach and even promote for. Warren is another matter, at least as they see things now...

With Warren an establishment donor non-starter and Amy Klobuchar persisting to poll in the low single digits. Hillary suddenly found herself in October without a ride to the convention. She briefly toyed with the idea of running Herself, but even Hillary isn't THAT self unaware. She also got Duval Patrick to agree to have his name put on a few early ballots, but the less said about that the better.

And so, desperate to remain a player in the game she had dominated for so long, Hillary turned to the one man who could still make all of Her White House dreams come true. Someone with the national stature of Biden and the money of Crassus to come swinging onto the Dem debate stage like Spiderman, spinning an impenetrable golden web to bedazzle and entrap his opponents.

Except at the first debate SpiderMike Bloomberg promptly swung straight into a multi-candidate bug zapper, and that was it for SpiderMike's campaign. Warren herself took particular zeal in zapping the guy who helped zap her bid for GOP donors, turning to ash Bloomberg's personal reputation and over half a BILLION dollars of his campaign cash faster than Mike could say 'NDA'.

Stop Bernie Plan B(iden).

With the Iowa caucuses fast approaching and neither Team Hillary nor Team Obama fielding a candidate with a realistic chance of sustaining viability past the early primary dates, a consensus began to emerge among the Dem Establishment that Plan A was fatally flawed.*

By mid January, rumors of a Plan B were already circulating, as the party nobility became increasingly nervous about the possibility that Bernie Sanders, with his massive army of volunteers, a universally popular platform, and a cash machine of small donors, might this time overwhelm even the best efforts of the DNC to rig the primaries against him.

As Caitlin Johnstone noted (H/T CS in AZ):

Back in January, well before the Democratic primary race had taken on its current composition, independent journalist Ruth Ann Oskolkoff reported that a source had heard from high-level Democratic Party insiders that they were planning to install Joe Biden as the party’s nominee, and to smear Bernie Sanders as a Russian asset.

"Now the fix is in politically. On January 20, 2020 at 8:20 p.m. PDT I received a communication from a reliable source. This person had interactions earlier that evening with high level party members and associates of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) who said that they have now selected Biden as the Democratic Party nominee, with Warren as the VP. They also said the plan is to smear Bernie as a Russian asset. So the DNC has coronated Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren as the presidential and vice presidential nominees."

Although subsequent poor performances on Super Tuesday would place the Warren VP bid in jeopardy, well before Iowa Caucuses the Democratic establishment was already signaling that the divide-and-conquer strategy of Plan A was soon to be scuppered in favor of an Establishment Unity campaign on behalf of Joe Biden.

Next Time: El Cid Rides Again (Plan Biden)