Me on Biden

I am from the Philly suburbs, so at time Biden seems more like my Senator than the Pennsylvania senator not named Arlen Specter. And before I ever really got into politics – it really took my move to the metro dc area for grad school for that to kick in – the story that endeared me to Biden as a person is the following.

Biden made it work. He won, and became the youngest senator. But before he could even take office, Neilia, his two sons, and their baby daughter were in a brutal car accident in Delaware. Neilia and the baby were killed and the boys, Beau and Hunter, were badly injured. Biden stayed by their side during their recovery and initially refused to return to D.C. to take his Senate seat, acquiescing only after then-Majority Leader Mike Mansfield pushed him to take it. Biden vowed to remain a fixture in his sons' lives. Valerie became their surrogate mother, and Biden began the daily commute from Wilmington to Washington that made him an Amtrak champion for life. Even after Biden met and married his second wife, Jill, five years later, he didn't surrender the back-breaking schedule. "Kids keep a thought in their heads for 12 hours," he says at one campaign stop. "They aren't gonna keep it for 24 hours." He's been rewarded with two now-grown boys who are loyal to him with every inch of their being, who stump in Iowa for him, and who speak the same language of electoral politics that he does, and a surrounding extended family that remains just as beholden - and just as active. For Biden, it all comes back to his home base.

The article this is taken from is a bit dated, but hits on all of the pertinent aspects of his life. In my eyes it is quite fair and worth a read.

As for Biden, I think he brings Obama a lot of cred in a few aspects, the most obvious is his vast foreign policy experience most recently on display with his trip to Georgia (the country not the state). The others are just as important to the Obama campaign: he is a foreign policy centrist; he is a pit bull and will not back down when confronted; he is an excellent debater; he has shown great loyalty to causes and people; though he represents Delaware in the Senate, he originally is from a working-class family from northeastern PA, and, as I said in my opening of this post, he is well known in southeastern PA; he has the ability to talk and connect to anyone, especially working-class people; Biden loves Amtrak; and he is Catholic.

The pit bull nature of Biden is important because Obama seems unwilling (or unable) to fight back until very recently. Biden will not have this problem against McCain or his veep choice. On the electoral college, this makes Obama even more palatable to SE PA and gives him needed inroads to the NE part of the state. As much as I love Obama's thoughtfulness and intelligence, his inability to connect to working class whites, especially in rust belt states, has befuddled me. I am still not so sure that his religion will mean anything when the final votes are tallied, but Obama's supposed weakness among middle-aged working Catholics (a favorite topic of Chris Matthews) is something that the talking heads obsess about with every new poll. (These are essentially the working-class voters that made up Hillary's base in rust belt states.) As for backing causes he believes in, I heard a story this morning in an interview with Richard Holbrooke that Biden worked closely with conservative Senator Jesse Helms of all people to create a bill (the Biden-Helms bill), which would have paid off our billion dollar debt to the UN in exchange for the UN make some substantial reforms to prevent corruption among other things. The bill never passed, but to get Helms, who actively despised the UN until very late in his lie, to coauthor the bill shows me something. The second to last thing seems insignificant, but is something that we have not had any recent modern presidential campaign address with any conviction. The creation of more and major improvements in mass transportation are needed in the country now. I am not advocating for government run mass transportation, though I think they should subsidize it on equal footing to highway subsidies, but I believe that this ticket will be the first in a long time who focuses on mass transportation. (Obama, as a city dweller, has spoken occasionally about the need for better mass transportation.)

As for Biden's drawbacks. Well he is, how to put this kindly, loquacious. Screw it, the man loves to talk – he can easily give a 30 minute answer to a question that could be answered in 5 minutes. This leads directly to my second problem: he is apt to make horrific verbal gaffes, as he put on display during the primary season a couple of times. Biden ran against Obama in this year's primary and so his words against Obama are going to be used by the McCain campaign. (Well there we go, there is already a McCain ad up doing just that. The power of the internet.) There is the horrific 2005 bankruptcy bill that he sponsored, which the credit card companies based in Delaware pushed hard for. He has some ghosts in the close that might reappear, the two that come to mind quickly are the statements that were made when he was chairman of the Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas confirmation and the plagiarism problems from his first run for president in 1987. And finally there is the real chance that he could be running for both VP as well as senator from Delaware. I really hated when Joe Lieberman did this in 2000, and I am not going to be a big fan of Biden doing it.

One last thing. I think that Biden's past may be an issue, but the McCain campaign will have to tread lightly to avoid McCain's own past from coming back to light. With the state of the economy and the number of lobbyists in his campaign, do you really think that the McCain wants to discuss his role in the Keating Five again? Well he could always use the POW defense again.


_John

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite