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Why Not Joe?
From David Catanese at U.S. News and World Report
:
Vice President Joe Biden has still not ruled out a 2016 presidential run and will make his intentions known by Aug. 1, according to two Democratic sources who have been in contact with his family.
Put yourself in Joe Biden’s shoes for a minute. You’re 72 years old, meaning that, barring a successful White House bid, your political career is over — and, as such, you have nothing to lose from ending up on the wrong side of the Clinton machine. You’re a guy who loves the give-and-take of retail politics at a time when the Democratic frontrunner is the Queen of Hearts. You’ve got a plausible appeal to blue-collar voters while Hillary Clinton is looking more like Leona Helmsley every day. And yeah, your foreign policy instincts may be less than stellar, but at least you never telegraphed to the public that the murder of an American ambassador abroad was tragic only insofar as it was an inconvenience for you.
My question: weighing all those factors — and recognizing the implicit discomfort with the Clinton candidacy that only seems to be growing within the Democratic Party — why on earth wouldn’t you take a flyer on this?
Published in General
If only we could be so fortunate.
I always thought “clean” was the most patronizing part of that.
In 1968 LBJ was the inevitable Democrat nominee. But when Clean Gene McCarthy ran a close enough second to Johnson in New Hampshire and was polling well in the next primary, Wisconsin, it showed the “inevitable nominee” was vulnerable. RFK and HHH jumped in while LBJ dropped out and his VP ended up with the big prize.
Biden’s playing it right. (He’s smart like dat!) Just sit back and let Wild Man Sanders show that HRC isn’t so inevitable after all. Joe knows that’s all she’s got– the notion that she’s the one that can win. Once that’s gone, and it goes away very quickly, our smooth VP slides in and shows the world what Joementum is all about, baby.
A chicken in every pot? No way. With Joe it will be a bitchin’ Camaro in every garage, America!
I always figured he meant “clean-cut” and just left off the second word.
That picture looks like the moment Hillary caught Ol’ Joe grabbing her . . . oh dear, the imagery is too horrible!
I’ll go even further: It WILL be Joe Biden! I think president Obama has a Reagan-fixation. I believe the president wants history to view him as the anti-Reagan; I believe the president wants his term to be viewed as a repudiation of the Reagan-era; and, perhaps most all, he wants his vice-president to succeed him, just as Reagan’s had.
Joseph Robinette “Joe” Biden Jr. will be the Democrat nominee in 2016!
On Joe’s side of the ledger … he was the grown-up who sat down with Mitch McConnell and made the last minute 2010 tax deal. It saved us from an enormous increase in the death tax and others, and the deal was really the only concession Democrats made after the great Tea Party election of 2010.
Also, Biden can point to his much derided “three Iraqs” Sunni-Shiite-Kurd plan as being better than what Obama has settled for thus far: letting ISIS and Iran fight it out at the expense of the civilian population.
On the other side of the ledger there is Biden’s fatal attraction to unintentional humor. This is no small thing to Democrats, who see themselves as the arbiters of all that is cool, hip, and snark-worthy.
Having their guy become the nightly butt of late night comedy might even be less acceptable to them than living under harsh (but satirically-ripe) Republican rule. So yes, Biden for President.
That’s the plus side from a Republican point of view. I am guessing that would be fatal in a Democratic primary, starting with the word “grown-up.”
I’m not sure what you’re arguing.
Biden didn’t argue for three Iraqs, he argued for four, and for those four to be part of a continuing state, so I imagine you’re talking about the popular version of the Biden plan, which involved somehow splitting the baby over Baghdad. Obviously, if you follow the part of the original Biden plan that dealt with the creation of an additional, regional, level of government in 2007, there’s no difference in the ISIS/ Iran situation. If you follow the part where the surge doesn’t happen, then I guess that would have made a difference; are you an opponent of the Surge, as separate from the rest of the Iraq decisions?
In your envisioning of this plan, is part of Baghdad Sunni? If there was a Sunnistan created, after you have the horrors of partition, the bloodletting and the wrecked lives as integrated workplaces are torn apart, you have greater poverty and an almost totally worthless army (there’s no way that the US would have supplied a Sunnistan with much in the way of arms, since none of the Sunni parties supported debaathification). ISIS would have taken Ramadi, and everything else, much sooner. If there’d been ethnic cleansing for Baghdad as well as other regions as a result of partition, ISIS would have that, too.
Other than making life easier to ISIS (and for Al Qaeda before ISIS), what do you imagine would have been achieved? It’s true that the Iranians wouldn’t be launching the same kinds of offensives against ISIS, but they’d still be fighting them (just a little further behind the lines). The Iraqi resistance to Iranian influence has come about because the anti-Iranian Shia have had the support of the Sunnis and Kurds. If you cleanse most of Iraq of its minorities, and cut the country down to a smaller size, you’re not preventing the domination of part of Iraq by Iran, you’re guaranteeing it.
Most of the civilian population of Iraq is doing okay right now. There’s a budget deficit (the war is expensive and oil prices are going down), but they’re in a peaceful and relatively successful part of the world; oil production is going up, schools are functioning (unlike during Saddam’s constant emergencies), and life is fine.
The Sunni Arabs who are being abused by ISIS, the Sunni Arabs who are being abused by Kurds and Persians, and the Shia, Kurds, and other minorities being attacked by ISIS each face their own issues, but they’re none of them worse off for Iraq’s unity, which is why there has never been a constituency in Iraq that has supported partition.
Just that he could position himself as having had a better idea than his boss.
No political argument for Democrats should be more than one sentence long.
I think this is true, but it should be able to survive a five minute conversation without looking stupid. Hillary backed interviewers would easily be able to expose the flaws, and those flaws can often then be condensed into a single dumb sentence.