If you believe Republicans have cornered the market on dysfunction, just wait until Joe Biden jumps into the presidential race. The identity politics crisis of the first black president either subtly (or not-so-subtly) backing an old white guy over the potential first woman president would be something to behold. Over at the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky foresees a bloody battle ahead:

A Biden vs. Clinton primary battle could be—and if Biden manages to win a couple of primaries, most certainly would be—far more acrimonious than the Clinton-Barack Obama fight of 2008.
Why? Three reasons. The first has to do with race and gender and history. When Clinton announced in 2007, she was going to be the first woman president. Then Obama got in, and he was going to be the first black president. He totally trumped her on the history-maker scale. I realize not everyone saw it that way, but in general terms, given the, ah, special racial history of this country, and given the role the Democratic Party played in changing that history for the better, Obama had the larger and more morally urgent historical claim to make in the minds of most Democrats and liberals. The woman would have to wait, as women so often do.
Well, she’s waited. Not that she had any choice in the matter, but she did. And now, to a lot of Democrats, it’s her turn. The party can make history twice in a row. Imagine!
So now, an old white guy is going to saunter in and step on that?

Before I go any further, what the heck is Tomasky talking about when he crows about the Democrats’ role in making our “special racial history” better. The Democrats were two-for-two as the party of slavery and segregation, and — as Kevin Williamson has pointed out — the South itself has become less and less racist as its become more and more Republican. It’s the solid Republican South that now enjoys net African-American migration back into the region.

But let’s put that aside for the moment and imagine for a moment a primary race where Hillary where virtually everything will be about sexism. Biden will soon find himself sounding like a Tea Partier shouting about Clinton corruption. Here’s Tomasky again:

Biden would have no choice but to build a run around the idea that she’s too risky. He or his surrogates will need to press the idea that the party could nominate Clinton and then next fall, Trey Gowdy finds that Holy Grail email that brings the whole thing crashing down. In other words, his candidacy is going to have to be built around what is in essence a Republican Party talking point.
And if he goes for the jugular, the Clinton team will surely respond in kind. They’re not wallflowers, those folks. They know how to fight. And they’d be fighting on behalf of the millions of Democratic women out there for whom it’s Clinton’s time. That’s her emotional rationale. But Biden has an emotional rationale, too: Beau. Where women will be protective of Hillary, Biden’s backers will be protective of him, too, because of his war hero son’s death.

As a conservative, I prefer Trump v. everyone (and the 26 million debate-night viewers) over the Left’s looming cage match. Yes, they’ll heal (most) of their wounds by the time of their convention, but can the Obama coalition be fully restored if it’s spent the previous eight months tearing itself apart? We shall see.