Run, Joe, Run: Why Democrats Need a Biden Candidacy

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/run-joe-run-why-democrats-need-a-biden-candidacy/361965/

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Joe Biden’s prospective presidential candidacy is in danger of becoming a joke. Every week, some new Democratic bigwig pledges himself to Hillary Clinton. Pro-Hillary groups have already assembled to fend off hostile campaign press. At last weekend’s White House Correspondents Dinner, President Obama added to the air of inevitability by teasing Fox News, “You’ll miss me when I’m gone. It’ll be harder to convince the American people that Hillary was born in Kenya.”

If there’s any suspense left about the Democratic primary in 2016, it largely revolves around whether an economic populist will challenge Clinton from the left. The prospect of Elizabeth Warren entering the race tantalizes many liberals. But since Biden’s not an anti-Wall Street crusader, his potential candidacy sparks barely any interest at all. That’s too bad. While a Warren candidacy would spark one valuable debate inside the Democratic Party—about government’s role in the economy—a Biden candidacy would spark another: about America’s role in the world.

Among today’s Democratic foreign-policy elite, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden represent opposite poles. Hillary’s a 1990s-style hawk. Although she and Bill came of age during the movement against Vietnam, they both grew far more comfortable with American military force during his presidency. In her first memoir, Clinton describes having supported America’s interventions in both Bosnia and Kosovo. As first lady, she lobbied for Bill to appoint Balkan hawk Madeleine Albright as his second-term secretary of state.

It was Albright who in 1998 famously called America “the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.” And that’s still Hillary’s view. As she commented in 2007, in explaining her opposition to immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, she is “cursed with the responsibility gene.” Which is to say: While Americans may sometimes chafe at the burdens of world leadership, and while presidents may make errors in upholding it, the greater threat lies is doing too little. For Clinton, even after Iraq, the real danger is less American maximalism than American minimalism, which creates a vacuum that America’s enemies will fill.

[GeorgeGist]

1. If Joe has been lobbying President Obama,

apparently his pleas have fallen on deaf ears. Which I suspect means that Wall St. prefers Hillary.

[PDittie]

2. I think he will run

but not if Hillary runs.

[MohRokTah]

3. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton are not very different on the issues.

I like Joe, but Hillary has already built a juggernaut of a machine.

I've got to back Hillary all the way.

[H2O Man]

4. Recommended.

I hope that he runs.

[hfojvt]

5. meh

So Biden will be a great President for the rest of the world.

Not so much for Americans.

I don't care any more for Biden than I do for Hillary. As I understand it, Biden was one of the main principles who got us the "compromise" that kept most of the Bush tax cuts.

[xchrom]

7. i can't forget the bankruptcy bill. nt

[BlueCaliDem]

6. All very good points made in the article. But having Joe run is playing into the hands of the GOP

and the Corporate Fascists who rule this country via the GOP (and to a certain extent, some in the Democratic Party).

If we can't GOTV this year and retain power in the Senate, the LAST thing we need to do is split the presidential ticket in 2016. We don't need another America where Corporate Fascists and the MIC hold power in all three branches of our government again. We've seen what happens when they do, as we've seen under President Cheney and his sidekick, Duhbya.

As a Democrat, HRC isn't perfect - by any stretch of the imagination. But she's almost godly when compared to another Bush (John Ellis) and the other pro-corporate, pro-war nutcases who are gearing up to run in 2016.

Think a President Cruz is impossible? Not after CU and McCutcheon, the gutting of the VRA, the new Voter Suppression laws popping up in waaaaay too many States, and America's Corporate Fascists' expertly executed psy-ops blanketing the easily bamboozled and politically disinterested American electorate.