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Biden should run. Now - Yahoo News

http://news.yahoo.com/biden-should-run--now-221648790.html

Biden should run. Now

.[image: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden tosses a stuffed animal to children
in Villa Nueva on the outskirts of Guatemala City, Tuesday, March 3, 2015.
Biden gav...]
It’s doubtful that many voters care as much about Hillary Clinton’s State
Department emails
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/politics/using-private-email-hillary-clinton-thwarted-record-requests.html?_r=0>
as reporters do. They’re probably not too wound up over the foreign
contributions flowing into her family foundation
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/foreign-governments-gave-millions-to-foundation-while-clinton-was-at-state-dept/2015/02/25/31937c1e-bc3f-11e4-8668-4e7ba8439ca6_story.html>,
either.

Cumulatively, though, these latest headlines about Clinton, along with
other stories sure to come, reinforce her vulnerabilities as a candidate.
Democratic primary voters are about to be reminded on a semiweekly basis of
what left a lot of them so ambivalent about Hillary in 2008 — namely, the
perception that the Clintons are like an unregulated industry within the
party, impervious to scrutiny and contemptuous of anyone who would get in
their way.

And this is why, if I were Joe Biden, and if I still harbored designs on
the Oval Office down the hall, I’d be inclined to ignore what the insiders
were saying. I’d run, and I’d run now.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the concerted effort
<http://news.yahoo.com/my-problem-with-the-clinton-death-star-220134299.html>
to make Clinton her party’s nominee by acclamation and why I found it
disturbing. As I said then, she might well be a good president, and
possibly even an inspiring one, but there’s just something unseemly about
the liberal reformers of the ’60s generation, men and women who fought to
create a more democratic nominating process back in the day, now trying to
back down anyone who would challenge the establishment’s candidate.

The question you hear most often from skeptics, though, is who that would
be. There’s Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, who apparently went
after Clinton
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/us/politics/martin-omalley-in-veiled-jab-at-hillary-clinton-derides-politics-of-triangulation.html>
with a jab at “triangulation” last week, but who hasn’t yet introduced
himself to most voters or offered any real argument of his own. There’s Jim
Webb <http://news.yahoo.com/is-jim-webb-for-real-184608862.html>, who would
probably have a better shot running as an independent. There’s Bernie
Sanders, who’s an avowed socialist, and Elizabeth Warren, who sounds more
like a Jacobin.

And then there’s the 72-year-old Biden, who is mostly left out of this
conversation — not because he hasn’t repeatedly signaled an interest in
running, but because the handicapping crowd has never taken him all that
seriously as a foil to Hillary. Biden has a well-known tendency to get
caught up in the moment and say things
<http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1895156_1894977_1846609,00.html>
that are impolitic or even partly untrue, which in Washington tends to make
you a figure of ridicule, though in most other places it’s known as having
a pulse.

The accepted wisdom where Biden is concerned is that you can’t have two
establishment candidates representing continuity from the same
administration, so the best he can do is to wait on the sidelines, keep his
options open and hope that maybe Hillary decides to do something else in
the twilight of her life, like bring a football team to Los Angeles, or
anchor the “Nightly News” on NBC.

Biden’s instincts have to tell him something different, though. After
40-plus years in Washington, he has to know that no one ever really gets
plucked off the sidelines when the opening arrives; you have to create the
opening yourself. He has to know, too, that the insiders are almost always
wrong, and the further out from an actual election you are, the more wrong
they tend to be.

Biden is a better candidate than most pundits have ever given him credit
for. Yeah, he’s sloppy and meandering and says some nutty stuff. But that’s
all part of being genuine and three-dimensional, which may be the most
valuable trait in modern politics and not a bad contrast to Clinton’s
robotic discipline.

Not incidentally, Biden is especially popular
<http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/joe-biden-briefly/> in Iowa,
where he first campaigned for president in 1988, and where he retains
unusually strong ties. (The Clintons, you may recall, have never met with
great affection there.) I remember being struck, in 2008, by the regularity
with which Iowa Democrats told me that Biden was their second choice and
would have been first if they thought he could actually win.

Biden’s a middle-class champion who makes the case for economic fairness
with more conviction than Clinton and less vitriol than Warren. He’s a
serious thinker on foreign policy who opposes rampant interventionism
without sounding like a pacifist. He more than holds his own as a debater.

And Biden has nothing to lose by making one last run before riding the
Amtrak back to Delaware for good. He’s already been through the unthinkable
death of his first wife and infant daughter in a car crash in 1972; a
trumped-up plagiarism scandal that very nearly ruined his political career
in 1988; brain surgery that threatened his life later that same year.
There’s nothing the Clinton machine can do to the guy that hasn’t already
been done.

But the main reason I’d tell Biden to run now is that you can’t actually
know the shape of the Democratic field unless and until you jump into it.
And that’s because very few people on the planet — possibly only people
named Clinton — know what’s really in Hillary’s mind, and in her stomach.

We know this about Clinton: She wants to be president and is building a
formidable organization to make it happen. She doesn’t see any adversary
who would be a serious obstacle to the nomination, and the insiders pushing
her to run insist she won’t have to worry about one.

Of course she seems 100 percent determined to run. If you’d offered that
same deal to Al Gore in 2004, or John Kerry in 2008, or Mitt Romney last
month, any of them would have grabbed it in a heartbeat.

But if a Biden gets in the race, suddenly that calculus is slightly
different. Now, if you’re Clinton, you have to ask yourself: Are you really
up for slugging it out in all those primaries all over again, with the
nonstop debating and parrying and standing in the bitter cold at 5 a.m.,
all with the very real chance that you could lose? Do you really want to
risk your hard-won standing as a stateswoman on a bruising campaign against
the only politician who has a stronger claim to Obama’s legacy among
liberal voters?

The answer is probably yes, that Clinton’s a candidate, serious opponent or
not. But there’s no way for Biden to be sure of that unless he forces her
to make the choice. Just as important, there’s probably no way for Clinton
herself to know until the gut check is real.

“I’m in it to win it” was Hillary’s garish bumper sticker when she entered
the 2008 race. Her party deserves to know that she isn’t running again just
because her path is clear. And Joe Biden has more than earned the right to
stand in it.


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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