Meet the real Joe Biden: Vice-President Plonker
The scrutiny of Sarah Palin diverted attention from Obama’s running mate, says Freddy Gray. Biden is not that popular, a ‘gaffe machine’, and he eats Snickers bars in one mouthful It has become fashionable to blame Sarah Palin for John McCain’s election defeat. Sure, say Washington insiders, Palin invigorated the conservative base — add contemptuous sneer — but she alienated the independents and undecideds. The God-fearing mother-governor of Alaska was not fit for high office. Her television performances were an international embarrassment. In choosing Palin as his vice-presidential candidate, McCain proved that he was overimpulsive, cynical, foolhardy.
All true to an extent. It should be recognised, however, that Senator Joseph Biden, the man who will now be sworn in as vice-president in January, is just as disastrous a public figure as Sarah Palin. In fact, he might be worse.
At times during the campaign, the two vicepresidential candidates seemed to be vying to outdo each other in a stupidity contest. The six-term Senator used his experience to come out on top. She didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was; he confessed that Hillary Clinton would make a better vice-president than him. She could only name one Supreme Court decision. But he said that the most important issue facing the middle class was ‘as Barack says, a three-letter word: Jobs. J-O-B-S. Jobs.’ Nobody could match Biden’s howler at a rally in Missouri, when he called out to State Senator Chuck Graham, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, saying: ‘Stand up Chuck! Let ’em see ya!’ Obama cannot claim that he was not warned. The press has long known about the ‘gaffe machine’ Senator from Delaware. Last year, Biden found himself grovelling to the liberal establishment after he said of Obama: ‘I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.’ (Italics mine).
Such clangers are not necessarily harmful to a candidate. Voters may even warm to an errorprone politician — it shows a little humanity. Yet there is something disconcerting, and strangely inhuman, about Biden and his blundering. For instance, what prompted him, with less than a month to go before election day, to guarantee a major threat to American security if Obama were elected? ‘Mark my words,’ said Biden. ‘Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.’ For all of the above, Biden is not a complete fool. In fact, many say he is a clever and capa ble man. But he is weird. A woman journalist I know was once trapped in a crowd of reporters shouting questions at Biden. The Senator, seeing her plight, rescued her from the mêlée and invited her to join him as he marched into a lift. My journalist friend was delighted: here was a rare opportunity for an aspiring reporter on Capitol Hill. As soon as the lift doors closed, though, Biden inserted an entire Snickers bar into his mouth, masticated heavily throughout the ascent, and then walked off without a word. That’s our Joe.
Obama clearly picked the wizened Biden to add political gravitas to his fresh-faced campaign, especially on foreign affairs. It was also thought that a Catholic boy from Scranton, Pennsylvania, would help appeal to the bluecollar masses in Appalachia and the Rust Belt — crucial swing regions where Obama had roundly failed during the primaries. Democratic polling among white Catholics did improve in the run up to 4 November, but this was more to do with the collapsing economy than anything else.
The trouble with Biden is that, for all his folksy populism, he isn’t that popular. His own presidential campaign — the one in which he suggested Obama wasn’t ready to lead America — was a complete flop. In the first Iowa caucuses on 3 January, Biden came fifth, winning slightly less than 1 per cent of the state delegates. He withdrew from the race that evening.
Biden’s political persona rings a little false. With his hairplugs and overcooked homespun wisdom — ‘As my old mother/father would say...’ — he often comes across as a bit of a phony. A few weeks ago, he rebuked McCain for avoiding Obama’s gaze during the presidential debates. ‘In my neighbourhood,’ he said, ‘you got something to say to a man, you look him in the eye and say it to him.’ A good line, but Biden took it too far, actually whipping off his jacket and pushing up his sleeves as though he were preparing for fisticuffs. The crowd whooped and hollered, but he still looked like a plonker.
Biden exudes the very faults that people saw in John McCain. There’s a hot-headedness about him, an anger masquerading as saltof-the-earth toughness. Both have endured intense suffering: McCain during his five years as a prisoner of war; Biden after his wife and 13-month-old daughter died in a car accident. One doesn’t have to be a psychiatrist to see how such painful experiences might contribute towards the emotional volatility that both men exhibit. Certainly, on foreign policy — supposedly their strong suit — Biden and McCain tend to share the same aggressive impulse: send in troops, whenever, wherever.
Biden is a devout liberal internationalist, committed to using US muscle to make the world a better, more democratic place. He has encouraged American intervention at almost every opportunity, from Kosovo and Baghdad in the past to Darfur and Georgia in the future. He may have opposed the first Gulf war in 1991, he played a key role in ramping up Bill Clinton’s hostility towards the Serbs. He keenly backed the US’s subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Today, Biden maintains that he and the American people were misinformed about Iraq. If that’s the case, he has only himself to blame. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, he helped ensure political and public support for the war. During the Senate hearings, his committee failed to consult a single expert who opposed military attacks. Biden pushed for a United Nations agreement, but ultimately he voted for President Bush’s pre-emptive war without UN support. (In fact, as far back as 1998, he had actually called for unilateral action against Iraq: ‘The only way we’re going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we’re going to end up having to start it alone.’) In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Biden said that he had only consented to be vice-president on the condition that he would be ‘part of the major policy decisions’. Uh-oh. After eight years of Dick Cheney, who greatly aggrandised the size and scope of his office and the executive, many Americans were hoping the next ‘veep’ would return to his traditional role: characterised by Benjamin Franklin as ‘Your Superfluous Excellency’. Biden, with his appetite for conflict and gift for the gaffe, can hardly be expected to settle for prestigious irrelevance inside the vice-president’s mansion.
Who knows? For now, we should applaud Barack Obama, not simply for being the first black man elected President of the United States — there’s enough people doing that already — but for winning an election despite having Joseph Biden on his ticket.
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