No need to keep the Biltmore in Scottsdale open, because Joe Biden dined on Bernie Sanders Sunday night.

Though the Arizona debate wasn’t actually held there, rather in Washington, it was desert not dessert for the contest’s oldest candidate. Yes, it’s true the Vermont senator opposed the nation’s ruinous “free trade” agreements, when the ex-vice president did not. It’s also right that the former Delaware senator got Iraq wrong, bequeathing pointless, murderous authority to George Bush’s White House. Also true: Biden callously reworked the nation’s bankruptcy laws. By burying the hatchet with Elizabeth Warren, he has all but admitted this.

Joe Biden keeps losing battles and winning wars. He may be his party’s sin-eater, but he keeps moving forward. Even as a portion of the population deems him senile, he steers himself through chopping waves. 

More transgressive: the Bernie Sanders who appeared on Lou Dobbs in the Naughties perhaps got the immigration issue then right, though not for the reasons he argued Sunday night, as Biden shrewdly pointed out. Sanders, sort of, even got right the automatic Russophobia emanating from Democratic quarters. But as he showed Sunday night, he’ll also shy from his record when it suits him. 

The difference between Sanders and Biden is simple: politics is their chosen profession, and Biden is better at it. 

Bernie may have won the Nevada primary, but to watch the last month of Democratic politics is to watch the lifetime saver lose it all at the table to a Vegas card shark. It doesn’t matter if you have a flush if you fold. The most embarrassing moment for the fading political commodity in the debate Sunday night was being reminded by CNN’s moderator to explain what he would do to address the COVID-19 crisis now. He did not. 

Said Biden, by contrast: “We have problems we have to solve now. What’s a revolution going to do? Disrupt everything, in the meantime? … The senator talks about Medicare for All, he still hasn’t told you how he’s ever going to get it passed. … It doesn’t even kick in for four years, even after it passes. We want a revolution? Let’s act now.”

At his worst, Joe Biden can reek of hired bull. But at his best, he’s a trained, if misunderstood, political killer. It’s not a feat of undistilled white privilege that he’s hung around in the center arena of American politics for a half century. He’s got chops. Biden gets to bathe in the rich irony that, for most of this campaign, he’s had less money than a socialist. He pointed this out Sunday, recasting his triumphs as not those of an establishment mandarin, but of a plucky underdog. 

Biden is perhaps so effective — I remind you, look at the vote totals — against Sanders because he’s lived the desperate reality Sanders describes. He was among the poorest United States senators. He’s sat next to the hospital beds of his dying children. 

So, when Biden gets pressed repeatedly, in premeditated gotcha moments, about past votes, as he was by Sanders Sunday, he knows that the American people want alleviation, not allocution.  

That’s why Biden’s record doesn’t matter. Not because that’s fair: it’s not. But because that’s the way the dice roll. If Bernie wanted to play this game, and actually win — which has never been fully clear — it was his job to know that. 

To listen to a Biden speech is to listen to a, garbled, vision of the future. But listening to Bernie can be like hearing the results of an autopsy, and Sunday night was no exception. Which is fair enough, because that’s where his campaign is now headed anyway.

Biden’s plan to respond to the coming Corona catastrophe — the virus is clearly poised to wreak more havoc economically than clinically — is a, perhaps uninquisitive, redux of the Bush-Obama response to the troubles of 2008 and 2009. But at least it’s a plan that could actually happen before the worst happens. 

To oppose whole cloth the emergency measures taken last decade, as Sanders did, is to enter the parlor of the unserious. “The bailout package is far better than the absurd proposal originally presented to us by the Bush administration, but is still short of where we should be,” Sanders said on October 1, 2008. For Bernie Sanders, we are always short of where Bernie Sanders says we should be. 

It’s all nourishing news for the right-populists in this horseshoe age of extremes. At least they wield power.

Biden, in an earlier exchange this year with Sanders, pressed Sanders on revolution: Sanders, preposterously, denied he was a revolutionary. Biden pointed out that the senator’s political arm is called “Our Revolution.” 

Sanders has brought America a form of honesty, but he’s shown himself to be a man caught between two worlds. 

Sanders now styles himself an heir to the New Deal, but that description elides his past, explicit sympathies with the Soviet orbit, positioning all but the most extreme members of Roosevelt’s brain trust were careful to avoid. 

So, this is where Bernie Sanders is left, between Franklin Roosevelt and Finland Station. As travel restrictions ramp up in the States, turns out, that leaves him in the same place as the so many Americans he cares about: 

Stranded.