Word.
I think these are excellent observations, and you’ve articulated what I’ve been thinking. I think I’ve opined previously that Biden simply looks old and worn out, but you’ve explained in specific detail why I think he looks past his prime. You’re absolutely correct: a halting delivery, trailing off at the end. I was actually nervous for Biden, wondering when the conversation would come back to him.
Trump is almost as old as Biden so age would be an issue for Trump, except for the fact that Trump is an utter and total buffoon on stage and people have come to expect that from him. Trump doesn’t debate; he entertains, he puts on a show, like he’s on the WWE. He doesn’t have to stay on script; he quite easily goes off script and it doesn’t hurt him. But that’s not Biden’s game.
Those are the reasons Biden never got anywhere in his previous runs, even when he was younger and still vigorous. His skills are in backslapping and dealmaking, not in campaigning, although he can still crank up a good speech when he wants to. The basis for supporting him this time is nostalgia for Obama, and that will only hold up for so long.
It looks like Klobuchar is in by her campaign’s statement last Friday. (Washington Post cite)
Two more are close - Yang and Castro. They hit the fundraising requirement and only need one more major poll at 2%. Yang thought he qualified but the DNC disallowed one of his polls since it and another were both sponsored by NBC. Simply statistical noise might get them across the line since the qualifying line is lower than the margin of error in most of the polls. Gabbard claims she meets the donor requirement but only has one major poll at 2%. That’s harder to back into by luck or influence. The story mentions getting quite a bit of attention out of the last debate.
So that takes us to 8 included with maybe up to 11 in the debates unless something big happens.
Then you havent listened to his latest speech, where he calls out trump and the GOP.
That’s a fair assessment.
TLDR: The USSR trip was part of a sister city deal between Burlington and Yaroslavl. It had been scheduled far in advance, and when they decided to get married, they scheduled their wedding to accommodate the trip. They were part of a delegation including ten other Burlingtonians. Sanders’ schedule there was full of official meetings, interviews, and other functions. So it was a business trip, not a vacation.
If you had happened to take a business trip to the USSR immediately after getting married, and took your wife with you, wouldn’t you call that trip a “honeymoon”? If not, you have no sense of humor.
I find it hard to imagine that anyone other than Fox News viewers are going to care at all about this in 2020, and apparently the other 347 Democratic candidates feel the same way, as none of them have tried to make an issue of it as far as I know. Slacker spent all of 2016 assuring us that Bernie’s support was going to collapse as soon as people found out about this. Guess he’s still waiting.
FOX News has always kept most of their anti-Bernie powder dry until he was the nominee and it’s too late. You point out that it hasn’t yet been pimped heavily on FOX, but imply that everyone knows about it? 
ETA: And other Democrats aren’t saying anything about it because it would be risky to their own campaigns. If he were the frontrunner they would definitely bring it up.
In 2016 there was maybe something to be said for the argument that Hillary was always in a strong enough position to not want to “go low”.
Now…the likes of Bullock, Hickenlooper, and Klobuchar are all doing so well that they don’t want to take the risk of going on the offensive against Bernie? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
You were doing so well, but now you are regressing.
Being tagged as a “McCarthyite” can be damaging to their prospects for a veep or Cabinet spot, even to their standing among liberal donors for their own future races. The scenario where that risk gets set aside is when it’s down to Bernie and one other candidate, but Bernie has a substantial lead and the other candidate needs to throw a Hail Mary.
None of these caveats apply to the general election.
It’s not that relevant to the primary. It would be doom in the general election. It’s the optics of it, not the specific details of the trip, that will be used successfully against him. There’s a freakin’ video of him with his shirt off, drinking and singing songs with Russians. Don’t think that every single Trump campaign ad wouldn’t show the country that video, or that it wouldn’t rocket to the top of the meme-o-sphere and be seen by everyone with a computer or a phone, day in, day out, for week after week after week.
I like Bernie Sanders as a guy. I think he’s got a lot of heart and he is a tough fighter. But I don’t share the idea that he could connect easily with working class America - most blue collar people in this country do not understand what Democratic Socialism is and they don’t care how things are done in Norway and Sweden; they don’t buy into class warfare, they don’t view the 1% as a boogieman, and “Wall Street” and “Big Banks” are meaningless abstractions to them.