Joe Biden really thought that he was the inevitable nominee. He really thought he would just waltz in and rally all the Democrats to his side.

My oh my, how the tables have turned on ol’ Creepy Joe.

The former vice president abruptly announced on Tuesday morning that he won’t spend primary night in New Hampshire as planned and instead is flying to South Carolina to headline a newly scheduled kick-off rally in the state he’s long considered his campaign firewall.”

“We’re going to head to South Carolina tonight,” Biden told reporters as he visited a polling station with voting underway in the state that holds the first primary in the race for the White House. “And I’m going to Nevada… we’ve got to look at them all.”

The campaign confirmed Biden is now canceling his originally scheduled appearance at a primary night party in Nashua, N.H., and will be in South Carolina instead. The New Hampshire party will go on as scheduled without him. But the campaign emphasized that Biden would continue to stop by polling stations during the afternoon.”

I think Joe’s worn out his welcome in New Hampshire. Don’t you think so? Even his wife Jill is having to get into the act and move the hecklers away.

We have all been watching the train wreck of the Biden campaign in slow motion. Joe skipping out on the expected shellacking that he’s about to get in New Hampshire is surprising, because it is a tacit acknowledgement of what we all know – his campaign is in deep trouble. Running to South Carolina – Biden’s supposed “firewall”- is an obvious ploy to shore up his support in the black community. However, that support could be fading away quickly, as both Tom Steyer and Bernie Sanders are making strong efforts to be competitive there.

Here are two inescapable facts for the Biden campaign:

1) Biden must win Nevada and South Carolina in order to stay viable in this race.
The current polling data in Nevada is now a month old and essentially useless. (Where are all the pollsters? Is it really that hard to run a poll in Nevada??) If Biden can’t win there on February 22nd, then what will it matter if he pulls out a win in South Carolina a week later? If Bernie beats Biden in Nevada, wins New Hampshire later today as he’s expected to, and just barely loses Iowa, he’s virtually unstoppable. His momentum going into Super Tuesday will be undeniable, even if Biden ekes out a South Carolina win.

2) Barack Obama prefers chaos to kingmaking.
It’s painfully obvious that Obama isn’t coming to save Biden. And that just has to hurt Biden on a personal level as well as a political one. Obama was reportedly pushing Warren behind the scenes, not Biden, and with the collapse of Warren and the rise of Bernie, you would think Obama – the one person left who could stop the Bernie campaign in its tracks, rally black support, and raise tremendous amounts of campaign contributions – would throw his support behind his former vice-president. And there is radio silence. Obama seems willing to let the Democrats suffer the consequences of nominating Bernie Sanders, and not caring about the good of the country or his party. Says a lot about the character of the former president, doesn’t it?

While the other candidates aren’t willing to deliver the death blow to Biden, they are content to let him fade away. The fading just became a lot more certain with the concession without a fight in New Hampshire.

Featured image: photoshopped image by brandxillustration.com. Used by permission.