Biden to other candidates: drop out Welcome to the Maclean's Politics Insider: America 2020, launched for readers who crave U.S. political news during primary season. If you want to receive this new newsletter, take no action, it will arrive in your inbox every weekday at noon. If you'd rather not receive it, please unsubscribe here. Biden says other candidates should drop out: The last stand-alone primary before Super Tuesday is in South Carolina this Saturday night. It is the primary that will decide the fate of Joe Biden's candidacy: if his popularity with older African American voters can't win him a state with a large African American population, then he'll probably have to drop out. But according to a new Clemson University poll, Biden still has a commanding lead, over billionaire Tom Steyer, who has spent heavily on advertising in the state to try and cut into Biden's lead. Biden said in a short interview with the Charleston Post and Courier that other candidates some of his competitors should consider leaving the race (and, perhaps, allowing him to consolidate the anti-Bernie Sanders vote) - if they don't do well with black voters on Saturday: "How do you stay in if you have demonstrated you can’t get any African American support? How do you stay in if you don’t get support in South Carolina? So I just think the process is going to take care of that. I don’t think it requires anybody to say, ‘get out of the race.’” Obama wants anti-Biden ad pulled: While Barack Obama hasn't endorsed Biden or any other candidate, he has been indulgent of ads that use clips of him to make their case. But not this ad: a pro-Trump PAC, The Committee to Defend the President, ran a commercial in South Carolina that uses a audio clip of Obama reading from his book "Dreams From My Father," using the term "plantation politics" - in the book, he's quoting a barber he met in Chicago, but the ad makes it sound like he's quoting Joe Biden . Obama's team has demanded that the ad be pulled, with his comunications director calling it "straight out of the Republican disinformation playbook." This isn't the first time that quote has been used out of context in ads, which may demonstrate the risks of reading your own books in the audio version. More clips of Bloomberg the Republican: And speaking of audio clips, CNN went over the tapes of the radio show "Live From City Hall," which Michael Bloomberg appeared on weekly when he was Mayor of New York (and, nominally, a Republican). In 2009, Bloomberg said that Bernie Madoff was not responsible for the greatest Ponzi Scheme of all time: "Social Security is, far and away." A few years later, he said that while the Bush tax cuts should expire, "if you don't cut entitlements, the rest is a joke." In that era, talking about fiscal austerity and entitlement cuts was fashionable, even among Democrats, but it's a different era now, and the campaign has already gone after Donald Trump for being open to cutting entitlement programs. Don't vote Bernie, says former McGovernite: A lot of older Democrats have traumatic memories of 1972, the last time a left-wing anti-establishment Senator won the nomination. Steven Petrow, a member of the Board of Contributors for USA Today, took to the paper's opinion pages to beg readers not to nominate Bernie Sanders, citing his own experience as a teenager campaigning for George McGovern, back when Richard Nixon "was what I considered evil personified." Petrow concludes that young people helped re-elect Nixon in a landslide by elevating McGovern, and the same thing will happen with Sanders and Donald Trump . But when he was young, would he have believed someone who told him that? Jesse Jackson defends Sanders: While Jesse Jackson hasn't endorsed a candidate, he did use his most recent column to reassure older readers about Bernie Sanders and the "socialist" label in particular, writing that "democratic socialism" doesn't mean the kind of socialism they have "in Cuba or Venezuela," and reminding readers that in his own famous presidential runs of 1984 and 1988, "some tried to slur me as a socialist or a communist." —Jaime Weinman | 
