Senator Joseph Biden doesn’t think highly of the Iraq policies of some of the other Democrats who are running for President. To hear him tell it, Hillary Clinton’s position is calibrated, confusing and “a very bad idea.” John Edwards doesn’t know what he’s talking about and is pushing a recipe for Armageddon in the Middle East. Barack Obama is offering charming but insubstantial fluff. And all of them are playing politics.“Let me put it this way,” Mr. Biden said. “You didn’t hear any one of them get in this debate at all until they announced for President.”
Mr. Biden, who ran an ill-fated campaign for President in 1988, is a man who believes his time has finally come, announcing this week that he was filing papers to make his 2008 Presidential bid official. Although he admits to a tendency to “bloviate,” he thinks that an aggressive advocate with rough edges might be just what the party needs right now. “Democrats nominated the perfect blow-dried candidates in 2000 and 2004,” he said, “and they couldn’t connect.”
Though Mr. Biden, 64, has never achieved his national ambitions, he has in recent years emerged as one of the partyÂ’s go-to experts on foreign policy. In the past week, he has spearheaded the Democratic pushback against the PresidentÂ’s plan to increase troop levels in Iraq, opposing the move with a non-binding resolution that his party has rallied around.