Biden Boomlet Is Strictly Insider’s Game For Now

As political pundits try to rev up excitement over a potential Biden presidential campaign, most in the public should save time by focusing on more pressing matters.

Vice President Joe Biden is an establishment corporate Democrat whose entry into the 2016 would not appreciably change anything except to provide Democrats an alternative for Hillary Clinton in case her campaign implodes.

Barring some as-yet unknown crisis in health, however, her track record provides no indication that she would ever withdraw until the end of the primary season no matter what the competitive field or accusations thrown at her.

Moreover, campaign pundits typically over-praise a candidate pondering a race and then lower the boom soon after entry with harshly negative reporting.

Biden has provided through the decades plenty of cause for criticism. So, he knows better than most that a third run for the presidency is likely to bring out the skeletons, including viciously unfair treatments in the past.

Biden, for example, has been deeply involved in foreign policy decisions that have created vast tactical, strategic and moral reverses, with a few exceptions. In a White House photo Aug. 230, 2013, for example, Biden sits at the president’s far right on one of their many high-level meetings in the Situation Room regarding the U.S.-led attempt to overthrow Syria’s government. This disaster tends at best to serve as modest improvement over bad alternatives stemming from bipartisan failures that most of the participants helped create years ago.

Clinton has also help lead this decision-making. One of its tenets is that that United States leaders have the right to order bombings and government overthrow almost anywhere in the world so long as humanitarian or democratic reasons are cited.

There is little room for distinction between Clinton and Biden regarding the carnage. One exception is that she left the administration before many of the worst of the calamities. Yet she as Democratic front runner has borne the full brunt of partisan attacks over the deaths of four U.S. personnel in Benghazi and claims she violated State Department rules by using a private email server.

The pattern of recent expensive, illegal and inhuman foreign policy horrors includes the U.S.-led war against Libya and the ongoing carnage in Syria, the Ukraine, and Yemen. Particularly shameful has been the war profiteering by Biden’s son Hunter in the Ukraine, a director in a major energy company following the U.S.-led coup against Ukraine’s government in February 2014. State Department personnel were caught on tape plotting the coup and a role for the vice president in February 2014.

The language suggested the speakers, including U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Victoria Nuland (shown in an official photo), a prominent neo-con holdover from the Bush administration, as describing Biden as if he were a mere stooge for the neo-cons controlling U.S. policy. Details: U.S. diplomat apologizes for profane remarks on E.U. in leaked phone call.

More generally, this editor’s take is based on politics watching beginning with coverage in Chicago of the iconic 1968 Democratic National Convention. That gathering included an open field for the Democrats following the resignation of incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson in March and the assassination of top contender Robert F. Kennedy in June, the same evening he won the California Democratic primary.

More recent research has included attendance at Clinton’s last two major events during her 2008 presidential campaign, at the Mayflower Hotel and National Building Museum in Washington, DC. Each event involved her concession to Obama in June when the numbers simply did not stack up for her continuance, aside from her dramatic but essentially hopeless effort to fight the Obama steam-roller by securing the seating of her delegates from Florida and Michigan at the Democratic National Convention.

The chapter “Joseph Biden: When the Smiling Stops” in our book Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters. surveyed the strengths and weaknesses of a career that makes Biden the longest serving federally elected office holder in the nation, aside from Congressman John Conyers (D-MI). Here is an except. “Over the course of his career, Biden had held important chairmanships in the Senate, but faltered on several major issues. Politics in America, a reference book for Washington insiders, provides this thumbnail description:”

The son of a Scranton, PA, automobile dealer, Biden overcame a childhood stutter and often speaks with charming self-deprecation. But what has made him a compelling political figure are the tragedies and dramas of his private life. As a 29-year-old county councilman, Biden in 1972 summoned the brashness to challenge Republican Sen. J. Caleb Boggs in a campaign run by his sister. Running on a dovish Vietnam platform and accusing the incumbent of being a do-nothing, Biden won by 3,162 votes.

From that, Biden gradually morphed (as has Clinton) into an apologist for wars of aggression and corporate power, hidden with enough populist rhetoric to create a distinction from Republicans.