Don’t panic.

Today, I’m remembering the Nevada Democratic presidential caucuses on  February 22, 2020.

I attended, with my daughter Molly, who lives in Vegas. She was a delegate.  I didn’t vote of course, but cheered on my favorite, Bernie Sanders, and was thrilled when he won the day. I was even more pleased when the chattering media heads gasped and said Bernie’s win had brought him to the brink of winning the nomination, a prospect which scared the bulk of them, “progressives” included, almost into coronaries & strokes.

All the pundits could think of was to equate Bernie’s chances to about half of those of the late Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, an anti-Vietnam war candidate who had been my hero in 1972. McGovern lost that election to Richard Nixon, in a record landslide; he carried only the District of Columbia and Massachusetts, where I was then living.

I wasn’t buying that scenario; but Molly was. She voted for Joe Biden, who finished out of the running in the Nevada caucus. But Molly stuck with him: her judgment was that he was the one who could beat Donald Trump.

So we know how that all worked out, and won’t rehash that story. But a couple news items from it leaped back to mind as this weekend arrived, and most of the liberal and even many “progressive” pundits were still reeling from the fallout from the Thursday Night debate debacle, and crowding around entrances to cardiac and stroke units, clutching their pearls, beating their chests, digging through real estate listings for Montreal and Auckland and such, and playing endless variations on the post-debate theme of “Joe’s Gotta Go, or We’re all doomed. (And how are we gonna defenestrate Kamala on the way without anybody noticing??)”

The chorus is loud, the rhetoric apocalyptic,  and the fever has run rampant in such august precincts as the editorial board of the New York Times.

But it’s not universal; for instance, include me out. While I agree that Biden’s debate performance was dismal, depressing and discouraging, I found myself holding back, remembering the 2020 Nevada caucus aftermath, and repeating one question, like a mantra, which was:

“What will Jim Clyburn Say?”

For those who don’t remember, Rep. James Clyburn stepped forward in 2020, a couple days after the Nevada caucuses, with a loud and emphatic endorsement of Biden on the eve of the next primary, in his home state of South Carolina.

Clyburn’s endorsement changed the course of Biden’s campaign, from a series of pathetic losses to a turnaround string of primary victories, built on the solid support of southern Black voters, which swamped Bernie’s momentum and vaulted Biden into the lead, the nomination and (give or take a few coup attempts) into the White House.

Through the hours of peak panic on Friday, I listened to one broadcast/podcast after another in which a long line of pundits called for Biden to be replaced, preferably by tomorrow. But soon I began to notice something: all the ones I was hearing were white; and virtually all the people they were talking about, who should, they said, be pushing Biden into retirement, were also white.

Not that these chatterers were indifferent or hostile to Black Americans; by no means. Yet their default in what they saw was an emergency was a panicked and unrepresentative chorus of and by white people.

I’m a nobody, just a listener in all that throng. But the question occurred to me before I fell into troubled sleep on Thursday, and recurred when I awoke the next morning: what would Jim Clyburn say to this chorus baying for Biden’s replacement? And why wasn’t that at the top of the chorus’s song sheet??

It wasn’t a matter of precedence; there are other senior Congressmen who have served many terms yet earned little stature. But Clyburn occupied a pivotal position in 2020, and to my mind he still does.

And he did speak up on Friday. He compared Biden’s performance to “strike one” in baseball; not good, but not yet a “strikeout.” He told people to “chill out.”

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, House Minority Leader, was reserved, and pointed out Friday morning that Biden was to speak at a rally here in North Carolina, a pivotal swing state, at noon, and wondered if his performance would improve on the Thursday disaster. By all reports, Biden’s speech in Raleigh came through as fiery and clear, and was met with all but nonstop cheers from a large crowd.

Not bad. I wonder if Jeffries was encouraged; I was. I  nodded at this comment from another Black politician of some eminence, Barack Obama:

Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. [Obama famously flubbed his first debate in the 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney, on October 3, 2012; but he came back to sweep two more debates — and win re-election.] But this [2024] election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November.

For that matter, Clyburn’s call to cool down was punched up a notch by another official who had a bad debate experience, Pennsylvania’s Senator John Fetterman.  After suffering a very serious stroke midway through his 2022 campaign, Fetterman, still newly in recovery, faced a live debate with Republican Mehmet Oz on October 25, 2022.

I listened to it, with what I thought was full sympathy, yet Fetterman’s delivery was still full of cringeworthy moments. He stumbled repeatedly with garbled words and jumbled sentences. It was, in a word, awful.

Nevertheless, he continued to campaign, and beat Oz handily.

Yesterday, with characteristic pungency Fetterman told those calling for replacing Biden to “Chill the F— out,” adding: “I refuse to join the Democratic vultures on Biden’s shoulder after the debate. No one knows more than me that a rough debate is not the sum total of the person and their record.”

And if I try to listen between the lines, I hear Clyburn, Obama and Fetterman warning the guillotine chorus against trying to rush Biden to the scaffold (and shove Harris out the window) without taking full account of the segments of the Democratic base that were and still are critical to their being there, and their chances to stay.

And there’s no between-the-lines coyness in Biden’s rival in my 2020 visit to the Nevada caucuses: Bernie Sanders.

On Friday Sanders rejected calls for Joe Biden to end his presidential campaign. He agreed that Thursday’s debate had gone poorly, but there was time to retool.

“He’s not a great debater, he’s not necessarily a great speaker,” Sanders said. “People are just gonna have to say: Okay, you know what? Yeah, he’s old. Yeah, he’s not as articulate as he should be. But you’re voting for somebody whose policies will impact your life.”

Asked about the New York Times’s editorial board call for Biden to quit, and whether a different nominee could win the election, Bernie refused to speculate. Biden needed to get more specific about how he’d “improve the lives of working people,” not step down.

“Biden is the candidate,” he said. “I suspect he will be the candidate. I’ll do my best to get him elected.”

Which is also what Bernie did in 2020, after Biden overcame his early Nevada surge. And by the way, the reporters talked to Sanders not in Washington, but in Wisconsin, where he was in the midst of a week-long barnstorming tour, campaigning for Biden.

Loyalty. Eyes on the prize.

Head Down, Beat Trump.

Democrats have what some call a “deep bench” of younger leaders, many of whom I admire. But none as yet has either the universal name recognition, the nationwide organization or the funding base to mount the national campaign necessary to stop Trump.

Someday, one or more may well have them; I hope so. But now they don’t. And Amazon Prime at its most hurried can’t deliver them this week. If there is a credible replacement for Biden, I do not see him or her. Contemplating the alternatives now being bruited about brings to mind a remark attributed to several respectable Supreme Court justices (we once had many): “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

No, and neither is a national Democratic presidential campaign.

> A Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity. No matter what it says, it will likely dominate the airwaves and the screens for days; and then there’s July 4th, with special sales.

>The Republican convention, in what Trump called the “horrible” city of Milwaukee. Beyond the unprecedented spectacle of its coronation of a convicted and sentenced felon, there will be the parallel, bizarre unveiling of his craven Veep pick, followed by this person capping their long season of self-abasement with a choreographed grotesquery of public devotion and loyalty to a certified criminal, megamillion fraudster, rapist , racist, tax and golf cheat, a ceremony of ritual humiliation and ignominy, beside which the raunchiest drag performance would be a summit of refinement.