Team Biden is running the old Dean Smith four corners to keep Democrats at bay

Joe Biden, more to the point, Team Biden, is running the old Dean Smith four corners offense on Democrats, playing the rules to his advantage, running out the clock with the lead and the ball in his court.

The longer that Biden, a step inside the halfcourt line, stands there pounding the ball into the hardwood, daring Democrats who want to see him step aside for the good of the party, for the good of the country, to come out and pressure him, the more inevitable his nomination becomes.

I straddle the line as a sportswriter and a politics writer, so the four corners analogy comes naturally to mind.

A more recent pure political example of what we see going on is Ralph Northam.

Remember when everybody in Virginia Democratic Party circles called for Northam to step down back in 2019 after the blackface scandal first came to light?

The first reports on the yearbook photos from a generation ago came to light on a Friday; it didn’t seem possible in the moment that Northam would survive the weekend, and the odds worsened after a Saturday press conference in which Northam threatened to do a Michael Jackson-inspired moonwalk to somehow show that he wasn’t the blithering racist that the photos (and ironically, the moonwalk threat) made him out to be.

Not only did Northam survive the weekend, in the face of the dozens of calls for him to resign, from literally everybody who is anybody in Virginia Democrat land, but he went on to finish out his term, though, I think we have to concede here, that didn’t necessarily do Virginia Democrats any good.

Northam continued to blunder his way through the final two years of his gubernatorial term, drawing fire for his heavy-handed approach to COVID that provided the tailwind for MAGA-lite Glenn Youngkin to lead a Republican sweep in the 2021 state elections.

It seems that Biden is leading us down a similar path in 2024.

The CNN debate disaster was on a Thursday night; it didn’t seem, in the immediate aftermath, that Biden would make it through the weekend, but here we are, two weeks later, and Democrats are resigned, like Virginia Democrats came to be back in 2019, to their fate.

It took a while, four years, to be precise, but the powers-that-be in college basketball eventually legislated Dean Smith’s four corners into oblivion, the impetus being the infamous 1982 ACC Tournament final featuring future #1 NBA Draft picks James Worthy and Ralph Sampson and a freshman named Michael Jordan that Smith played to a 47-45 final score because he decided that the best way to beat Sampson and UVA was to take the air out of the ball.

Democrats will have, as it turns out, four years to figure out how to put their best product on the floor.

Assuming, of course, that Republicans don’t take the air out of democracy in the intervening four years.