Biden is Schrodinger's candidate

Biden’s campaign lives in a dual reality, like Schrödinger’s cat, where the former vice president is at once being written off as finished and yet still a front-runner in most national and state polls; at once trailing other Democrats in early primary states and yet performing the best against President Donald Trump in the key swing states; the candidate whose electoral viability was why Michael Bloomberg bailed out of the race, and the candidate whose electoral weakness is why Michael Bloomberg is now getting back in. His supporters also say, with reason, that he’s the only candidate among the front-runners whose big policy proposals bear at least a passing resemblance to legislation that could realistically pass Congress—and yet, they lament, he’s the only candidate who gets dismissed as both stuck in the past and naive about the future. (They also say he’s the only plausible candidate with even the slightest experience in foreign policy.) His critics say, also with reason, that his stumbling debate performances would probably be disqualifying for anyone else; his glitches have become so frequent that he’s now graded on a curve, with political observers and even his own aides greeting his bad days with “Could have been worse!” and his good days with “Better than I expected!”…

his isn’t the race Biden wanted to run. He didn’t want to apologize to Anita Hill. He didn’t want to change his position on the Hyde Amendment. He didn’t want to call the president names, as he did last week on 60 Minutes (“He’s an idiot”). He definitely didn’t want to have a super PAC. He dislikes ripping into other Democrats, to the point of convincing himself he isn’t. “I’ve never, ever run a negative campaign,” he said last weekend, shortly after hammering Warren for being “condescending” and “representative of an elitism that working and middle-class people do not share.”

“Yes, this is not the way he would have written it, but he also wouldn’t have predicted that Donald Trump is using the entire apparatus of American foreign policy to drum up false charges against Joe Biden,” said Anita Dunn, the former Obama communications director and longtime Biden friend who’s been advising him from the start of the campaign. “If in the spring as a staff we had gone to him and told him this would happen, I think he probably would have looked for a new staff and suggested we get some therapy for looking for conspiracy theories.”