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MSN.com
Why Joe Biden
can't get no respect
Ezra Klein
On Monday, I made the case that Al Gore should run for president. But
there's another obvious contender out there, too: Joe Biden.
Over at Yahoo, Matt Bai makes the case for Biden. "Biden," he writes,
"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."
And Biden's certainly got the resume. When President Barack Obama
wanted to make sure stimulus money didn't disappear to fraud, he turned
to Biden — "nobody messes with Joe," he said — and Biden succeeded.
When the White House wanted to avoid the fiscal cliff, it was Biden who
closed the deal with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. When Obama
flubbed the first debate against Mitt Romney, it was Biden who restored
the ticket's mojo by bullying his way past Rep. Paul Ryan. When the
Democrats held their 2012 convention, it was Biden's speech that pulled
the highest ratings — beating both Bill Clinton and Obama.
Biden's most off-the-reservation moment, meanwhile, is the kind of
thing that should help him in 2016. He pushed the Obama administration
to embrace gay marriage before it was quite ready. At the time, it
looked like a gaffe. Now it looks prescient.
And yet, according to a recent Marist poll, Biden is running 47 points
behind Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016 — and only
one point ahead of Sen. Elizabeth Warren. A quick scan of
RealClearPolitics' round-up of Democratic primary polls shows that's no
outlier.
It's not like Biden has been out of the public eye for the last seven
years. So why, if he's such a good politician, doesn't he command more
support in the Democratic Party?
Here's my guess: there's a cultural gap between Biden and the party he
seeks to represent. Biden is an old-school, white, male politician in a
party that's increasingly young, multicultural, and female. Biden's
gaffes matter because they tend to reinforce the perception among
Democrats that he belongs to a different era.
When Biden calls shady lenders "Shylocks," or says Obama is "the first
mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and
a nice-looking guy," he ends up coming off as, in New York Magazine
words , "your accidentally racist grandma." That leaves Biden facing
something more toxic than opposition: condescension...
Read the rest of the article at MSN.com
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