It?s 2 primaries now: Biden and everyone else

While more than half the field jostled at the Californian Democratic Party convention here — the largest single state party gathering in the nation — the former vice president had the lectern to himself at a Human Rights Campaign dinner on Saturday, contrasting his candidacy not with any Democrat, but with the Republican president.His counter-programming appearance served the latest reminder that, with large leads in national and several early state polls, Biden is running a race in a vacuum, adhering to his own rules and schedule. One of Biden’s rivals, California Sen. Kamala Harris, tossed her hands in the air when she was asked about Biden’s absence, while a Democratic strategist who is unaffiliated with any candidate called the scheduling of a conflicting event elsewhere “brilliant,” adding, “The scheduler who found that event and locked him into that deserves a raise.”Unlike other candidates, said Darry Sragow, a longtime Democratic strategist and publisher of the nonpartisan California Target Book, which handicaps elections in the state, “Joe Biden does not need to come to California to introduce himself to the people in that hall.” But the unexpected resilience and seeming durability of Biden’s candidacy has forced a quickening of the pace.“With this many candidates,” said Anthony Rendon, the Democratic speaker of the California state Assembly, “there’s going to be a point at which people are just going to start paying a heck of a lot more attention to the folks who are in the upper half.” With the end of the second fundraising quarter and the first primary debate looming this month, Biden isn’t even on their radar.In a performance that would be followed closely by Delaney the next day, Hickenlooper, who is polling at about 1 percent nationally, generated rare media interest on Saturday with a rebuke of expansive government.“Socialism is not the answer,” he said to jeers.Another low-polling Democrat, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, seized the moment immediately afterward, introducing himself to delegates as “a governor who doesn’t think we should be ashamed of our progressive values.”Hickenlooper said in an interview before his address that he was not planning to get booed, but he understood the risks of his message before such an activist audience.