If the American people wake up on Wednesday, November 4, to find that the cognitively challenged Joe Biden has been elected our 46th president, we’ll have just one man to curse: South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn.

Coming out of the all-important Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire Primary, Biden was deader than dead. He’d finished a dismal fourth in Iowa, behind the homosexual Millennial, the septuagenarian socialist, and the fake Indian. And for an encore, he finished fifth in New Hampshire, having also finished behind Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar. Eleven days later, he staggered into Nevada, and Bernie Sanders cleaned his clock by 26 points.

If ever a dude had the look of a loser, it was 77-year-old Joseph Robinette Biden. The voters who got to know him best — especially the citizens of Iowa and New Hampshire — had resoundingly kicked him to the curb.

Then came South Carolina, where Biden’s 28-point lead had been slashed to just four points by the irrepressible Sanders. Seemingly at once, the mainstream media and the rest of the Democrat establishment realized that their voters had fallen for the socialist. Real democracy, they feared, was about to rear its ugly head once more. They knew that a Sanders victory in the Palmetto State would put him on a glide path to the nomination, and they knew he’d be carved up by Donald Trump in the general election. So they did what all corrupt and power-mad political machines do: They put their thumbs on the scale and their long knives into Bernie’s back.

Socialism, all of a sudden, fell out of favor on CNN and MSNBC, and party pooh-bahs stepped up their whispering campaigns. And Clyburn, the 14-term congressman and South Carolina’s most influential Democrat, went all-in behind the only guy who could stop Bernie Sanders.

“I’ve known for a long time who I was going to vote for,” said Clyburn just three days before the primary. “I’m voting for Joe Biden. South Carolinians should be voting for Joe Biden.”

And that was all it took. South Carolina’s sizable black population, which holds considerable sway in the state’s Democrat politics, rose up at Clyburn’s command and rescued Palooka Joe.

Biden won by more than 28 points, and he knew precisely who’d made it happen. “My buddy Jim Clyburn,” he gushed, “you brought me back!” It was a humiliating admission for a former vice president, but we all knew it to be true. As NPR reported, “Half of South Carolina Democratic voters said Clyburn’s endorsement was an important factor in their vote — and Biden won them overwhelmingly, according to the exit polls.”

Next came Super Tuesday, and the neatly choreographed departure endorsements of Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Beto O'Rourke. And just like that, Joe Biden became the Democrats’ nominee. But it never would’ve happened without Jim Clyburn.

Which leads us to ask: What have the Democrats done, and what does it say about their party? They’ve propped up an elderly man who was for decades a harmless backslapper and an occasional presidential also-ran. They’ve put before the American people a decrepit old pol and asked us to vote him into the most demanding job on the planet. No thoughtful voter — to say nothing of Democrat Party officials — could possibly be comfortable with what they’ve seen in recent months, especially after what transpired during an interview last week with black and Hispanic journalists.

From the comfort of his basement, Joe Biden angrily attacked his black interviewer as a cocaine user and a “junkie,” said he was “forward looking” (as opposed to looking forward) to debating Donald Trump, stumbled repeatedly to complete a simple sentence about his physical and mental fitness for office, and took a bizarre swipe at the nation’s black community as utterly lacking in diversity compared to Hispanics.

And all this on the heels of having told his black radio interviewer a few weeks ago, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black!”

If one ever needed proof that the Democrats are more concerned with regaining power than they are with the welfare of this nation — or with the welfare of Joe Biden, for that matter — one need look no further than this sad, pathetic, preposterous presidential candidacy.