| It's at least as likely as 'Hillary 2016'... |
| There must be some probability between the usual zero and one where his success would fall. Given that he twice has been rejected as a presidential candidate -- in 1988 and 2008 -- Mr. Plugs, esq, as he prefers to the bare name, will likely find his presidential probability pegged hard to the zero end of things. |
Foreign Policy Whiz KidBiden
The former Senator-for-Life from Delaware, an example of the kind of top-notch Washington intellect to be found in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body...
declared his intention to "restore the balance" between his office and that of the president. In his view, Dick Cheney had essentially created a separate power base, nearly independent of the Oval Office. Biden's vice presidency was going to restrain those impulses. He would integrate his role and staff more smoothly and fully with the White House, more in the style of Walter Mondale
...Former Senator-for-Life from Minnesota. He was Jimmy Carter's vice president, and was trounced by Ronald Reagan in 1984, losing every state except for his home state and the District of Columbia....
during Jimmy Carter's presidency and, to a degree, Al Gore in the Clinton years.
But Biden has hardly taken a back seat. Instead, he has become President B.O.'s workhorse on issues from war to budgets to economic recovery. The New Deal Democrat from coal-country Scranton has even become a liberal standard-bearer on same-sex marriage, nudging the president to publicly shift positions. While Gore was given unusually significant responsibilities on very specific areas such as the environment and government efficiency, Biden, much like Cheney before him, has had plenty of running room on an array of key administration policies -- a sort of de facto assistant president.
Unlike the grim Cheney often shunted to undisclosed locations, however, Biden has been a visible sidekick to Obama -- enough to keep speculation alive about his presidential aspirations for 2016.
In nearly four years as vice president, Biden has been the chief monitor of the economic recovery efforts, coordinating federal projects with mayors and governors. As Obama's emissary to the Republican congressional leadership during the 2011 debt-ceiling negotiations, he was nicknamed the "McConnell whisperer" by aides, according to Bob Woodward's new book. And he has overseen the U.S. military and reconstruction agendas in Iraq and Afghanistan, while encouraging Obama to hold fast to the troop-withdrawal timelines Biden has advocated since taking office -- a point he emphasized repeatedly in his debate with Rep. Paul Ryan
...U.S. Representative for Wisconsin's 1st congressional district, serving since 1999. He is a member of the Republican Party. He proposed an alternative to President B.O.'s 2011 budget and made himself the target of both Democrat and Republican verbal pies...
(R-Wis.) on Thursday night.
While Biden showed distracting, Gore-like flashes of irritability toward Ryan, he filled in blanks that Obama had left unspoken in his own debate with Willard
MittRomney
...former governor of Massachussetts, currently the Publican nominee for president. He is the son of the former governor of Michigan, George Romney, who himself ran for president after saving American Motors from failure, though not permanently. Romney has a record as a successful businessman, heading Bain Capital, and he rescued the 2002 Winter Olympics from the midst of bribery and mismanagement scandals. More to the point, he isn't President B.O...
, and he brought the discussion back to the Democrats' standard defense of the middle class. In so doing, he provided a tonic his party needed after the president's flat performance.
Although Obama and Biden were not close in the four years they overlapped in the Senate,
| Eh? I thought our beloved president only spent a year practicing in the Senate before hitting the campaign trail in 2007. |
...a Chicago-based political hack, political adviser to Barack
B.O.Obama since 2004. Following the 2008 election, he was appointed as Senior Advisor to Obama and we all see how well that worked out....
and David Plouffe, their candidate was impressed with Biden in the 2008 Democratic primaries. After he delivered uncommonly pithy answers in debates, other contenders onstage would begin their responses with variations of "Joe is right." And in a South Carolina debate, when asked whether he could control his wagging tongue, Biden's straight-faced, one-word answer -- "Yes" -- brought the house down.
| But that was before he discovered the joys of artificial laughter. He'll never dip his toe in the old river again. |