Joe Biden is the last man standing, the picked-over surviving straggler from the whirlwind Democratic campaign.  Democrats are rallying around this miserable leftover, this sorry excuse for a candidate over nearly a dozen others, in the absence of anything else.

But while that's the best they get, the best we get is in watching how rival Bernie Sanders's candidacy is not going away.  He has a decent but unwinnable 30% or so chunk of support, but he hasn't given in to the consolidation.

Two things Sanders did have put Biden in a pincer vise.

One, the Sanders campaign is circling and circling, refusing to give up its fight, even though it's unlikely he can win.  Instead of just going home and endorsing the former Obama vice president, they're staying in and circling for an entirely different reason from most candidacies': the same reason vultures circle dying beasts.

Here's Politico:

Virtually the entire Democratic presidential primary has been predicated on one underlying assumption: the eventual collapse of Joe Biden.

More than a dozen of his erstwhile opponents bet their campaigns on it, and he's proven them all wrong. But his last serious opponent standing, Bernie Sanders, is still clinging to the same belief — and that it will finally happen on Sunday night, under the bright lights of their one-on-one debate.

To revive his campaign, Sanders needs to prove he's the best candidate to take on President Donald Trump and lead the country at a time of duress, his aides and allies say. But they also acknowledge privately it's going to take more than that — namely, for the gaffe-prone Biden to stumble.

So in other words, it's not Biden's strength, but Biden's weakness that is keeping them in, circling and circling, like vultures over dead or dying prey.  One false move, and Biden could make himself toast.  He's a live wire, uncontrollable by his handlers, and all they have to do to swoop in for the kill is to let him keep talking.

Meanwhile, the corollary, according to Politico, is this:

Another reason the Sunday debate looms so large in the Sanders team's mind is because his aides believe that voters who have seen Biden up close in states such as Iowa and New Hampshire have not supported him.

In other words, all Biden has to do is interact with voters, and he loses votes.  That's not hard to believe, given his recent treatment of a hardhat Detroit autoworker who asked him a simple question about his choice of Second Amendment policy enforcers and got a threat to get taken outside.  What voter would want to tangle with him after that one?  And it's not just one incident; it's multiple incidents.  The ads for Trump write themselves.

With someone like that as the Democratic standard-bearer, seems it's only a matter of time, so the Sanders vulture circles.

While Sanders waits in the wings for Biden to slay himself and leave a feast of delegates to pick up in the aftermath, the Bernie Bros are posing another problem for Team Biden.  According to the New York Post:

"We will never — NEVER boost or support Joe Biden or defend his abysmal record and terrible policy positions," Henry Williams, executive director of The Gravel Institute, told The Post. "We will tell people, as we always have, to vote their conscience and to make decisions based on the interests of all the world's oppressed people ... I do expect a massive exodus from the Democratic Party."

...and...

"I don't know if I could vote for Biden," said a high-profile local Democratic Socialist. "Biden is just an old white guy who inspires nobody. I sincerely think he will lose the electoral and popular vote and I know I won't be voting for him in New York."

The Bernie Bros, to refer to the broadest segment of Sanders's die-hard political base (this wouldn't just include the thug element), aren't coming onboard Team Biden, either — they just loathe Biden too much.  They have some similarities with President Trump's die-hard supporters in that they see Sanders as an outsider (only technically in that he's not always a Democrat) and Washington's swamp in good need of a hosing out.  Biden, having become a very rich man in public office, disgusts them as much as he disgusts Trump-supporters.  They amount to the flying monkeys of the Sanders campaign, loyal to a fault to Bernie, and there's no talking to them, except maybe if the speaker is Bernie.  That, in turn, amplifies Bernie's vulture power.

This isn't good news for Joe Biden.  Bernie may not have all the votes he needs to win the nomination, but that doesn't mean he can't wait it out in a war of attrition, confident that Biden will defeat himself.  The Bernie Bros, meanwhile, vow to stay home or vote for Trump if Bernie doesn't lead the ticket. That's a low vote of confidence on both fronts for Biden, whose campaign looks debilitated as the time comes to confront President Trump.

The vultures are circling, circling...

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of detail from photo by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0; Pixabay via Needpix public domain photo; and YouTube screen shot.