Tag Archives: Joe Biden

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Hillary might not win the nomination … really?

hillary

Is it entirely possible that Hillary Rodham Clinton — the one-time candidate of destiny for the Democratic Party — could lose here party’s presidential nomination after all?

Douglas Schoen — a former pollster for President Bill Clinton — thinks it’s possible.

His thesis is simple.

If U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders wins the California primary next Tuesday, the Democratic brass is going to come down with a case ofĀ terminal heebie-jeebies at the prospect of nominating a badly damaged candidate for the presidency.

Where would they turn? Who would redeem the party’s political fortunes?

That would be the vice president of the United States of America, Joseph Biden.

The vice president has said repeatedly two seemingly contradictory things about his decision to opt out of running for the presidency.

One is that he believes he made the right call. Two is that he regrets making that decision.

You might ask: Huh?

If you are, I get it. I’ve asked the same thing.

http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/Doug-Schoen-Pollster-Democrat-Hillary/2016/06/01/id/731649/

Honestly, I don’t know what will happen after Tuesday. Everyone’s expectation is that Clinton will secure enough delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot when Democrats gather this summer in Philadelphia. In addition to California, voters in the Dakotas and New Jersey are going to the polls.

Clinton cancelled campaign events in Jersey to concentrate on California.

What does all this mean for Biden?

“Mr. Biden would be cast as the white knight rescuing the party, and the nation, from a possible (Donald J.) Trump presidency,” the Democratic pollster said in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal.

I’ve stated already my admiration for the vice president. I wish he would have run. I understand why he stayed out. His son, Beau, had just died. The man is still mourning his son’s death.

In every other political year, though, it would appear that Biden’s decision to stay out of the race would be cast in stone.

As we’ve seen at almost every step along the way in this election season, this ain’t like anything we’ve ever seen.

 

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Obama lacks GOP go-to pal in Congress

Valerie-Jarrett

Valerie Jarrett gave a stellar defense Sunday night of her boss and long-time friend President Barack Obama.

Her appearance on “60 Minutes” was notable in her defense as well of her role — in addition to senior adviser — as friend, confidante and her easy access to the Leader of the Free World.

But she pushed back when CBS News correspondent Nora O’Donnell asked her about the president’s continuing prickly relationship with congressional Republicans. She said Obama has done all he could do to reach out.

O’Donnell, though, asked — but did get an answer — about the lack of a leading Republican in either the Senate or the House to whom the president could turn to fight for his legislative agenda.

It brought to mind the kind of relationship that previous presidents have cultivated with members of the “loyal opposition.” President Lyndon Baines Johnson could turn to GOP Sen. Everett Dirksen in a pinch; President Ronald Reagan had a fabulous after-hours friendship with Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill; GOP President George W. Bush relied on help from Sen. Ted Kennedy to push through education reform.

Barack Obama doesn’t seem to have that kind of personal friendship with members of the other side. He relies on his own instincts, his own circle of friends — such as Jarrett — and the vice president, Joe Biden, who to this day retains close friendships with Senate Republicans.

It’s that lack of kinship that has troubled many of us who want the president to succeed. I recall having this discussion once with retired Amarillo College president Paul Matney, who lamented that Obama had not developed the legislative know-how that LBJ brought to the presidency.

LBJ had served as Senate majority leader before his one-time foe John F. Kennedy asked him to be his running mate in 1960. Ol’ Lyndon knew how the Senate worked and he was able to parlay that knowledge — along with tremendous national good will after JFK’s assassination in 1963 — into landmark legislation.

Barack Obama has been forced to struggle, to battle relentlessly, to get anything past a Republican-led Congress intent on blocking every major initiative he has sought.

The reasons behind the ultra-fierce resistance will be debated long after President Obama leaves office.

He seems, though, to have lacked one essential ingredient to move his agenda forward: a good friend and dependable ally on the other side of the aisle who could run interference for him.

 

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Take this veep job and shove it

Vice-Presidents-of-the-United-States-picture-gallery

It’s been said of vice presidents of the United States that their mainĀ responsibility is to keep a bag packed in case they have to attend some foreign dignitary’s funeral.

Sure, they’re next in line to the presidency, but until the past quarter-century or so they’ve been treated with far less respect than they deserve.

As the crusty Texan, the late Vice President John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner once observed of the office — and this is the sanitized version of what he said — “It ain’t worth a bucket of warm spit.”

CNN commentator Jeff Greenfield has written an excellent essay that suggests that the vice presidency well might be relegated to its former inglorious status when the next president takes office in January 2017,

Here’s his essay: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/2016-election-vice-presidency-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-213886

His premise is a simple one?

The Republican Party’s presumed nominee, Donald J. Trump, possesses an ego so y-u-u-u-g-e that he isn’t likely to take seriously a single word of advice given to him by whomever he selects as vice president. And the Democrats’ probable nominee? Hillary Rodham ClintonĀ would share the White House with a man — her husband, former President Bill Clinton —Ā whoĀ would serve as her “Economy Czar” and whoĀ would provide all the political and strategic advice she’ll need.

What does that mean for the vice president?

Well, I doubt we’ll see anything like the way, for example, President Lyndon Baines Johnson treated Vice President Hubert Humphrey when he reportedly summoned HHH to his office and lectured him about something while sitting on a commode.

Someone once asked President Dwight Eisenhower about the duties he’d assigned Vice President Richard Nixon. Ike responded, “If you give me a week, I’ll think of something.”

The vice presidency, as Greenfield notes, has become a very important office.

The past three VPs have assumed vital roles in their respective administrations, according to Greenfield. Al Gore became a valuable advisor to President Clinton; Dick Cheney,Ā many have argued, grabbed too much power while serving as No. 2 to President Bush; and Joe Biden has become President Obama’s senior advisor/father confessor.

As Greenfield writes: “None of this means the thereā€™ll be a shortage of veep wannabees. A number of Republicans, especially those without (or soon to be without) an official public role, have already signaled their availability: Rick Perry, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin. And itā€™s not hard to imagine that any number of Democrats would readily sign up, however challenging the job might be with Bill Clinton shuttling between East and West Wings.”

Well, at least the next VP will get to live in a nice house.

 

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Don’t look for these rivals to make up

cruz-trump_jpg_800x1000_q100

Recent political history is full of examples of how rivals for the presidency have said means and occasionally disgusting things to and about each other … and then hooked up as allies.

In 1960, U.S. Sens. John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson fought each other for the Democratic presidential nomination. JFK was nominated and then picked LBJ to run with him. They won the election and the rest is, well, history.

Twenty years later, former Gov. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush battled for the 1980 Republican nomination, with Bush labeling Reagan’s tax plan as “voodoo economics.” Reagan won the GOP nod and then picked Bush to run alongside him as vice president.

In 2008, the combatants were Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden fighting for the Democratic nomination. Biden dropped out, Obama won the nomination and picked Biden to run with him. President-elect Obama then turned to another campaign rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and selected her to be secretary of state.

In 2016, well, matters are quite a bit different.

The battlers this time are Donald J. Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz. They are fighting for the Republican nomination.

The gloves are off. The brass knuckles are on. The men loathe each other. Trump calls Cruz “Lyin’ Ted.” Cruz is now responding with attacks on Trump, referring to him as a “pathological liar” and a “serial philanderer.”

Trump now says that Cruz’s father might have been a principal — are you ready for this one? — in the assassination of President Kennedy. Cruz’s response was classic: “Let’s be clear: This is nuts. This is not a reasonable position. This is kooky,” Cruz said in Evansville, Ind. “While I’m at it, I should go ahead and admit yes, my dad killed JFK, he is secretly Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa is buried in his backyard.”

Cruz is likely to get battered badly in today’s Indiana GOP primary. He’s going all-out against Trump. The men seem to truly despise each other.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/05/03/bracing-indiana-loss-cruz-unloads-trump/

Trying to predict any outcome in this year’s wacky presidential contest is a dicey proposition at best.

I feel comfortable, though, in asserting that Trump and Cruz will not team up for the fall campaign.

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If only the VP hadn’t said what he said …

Supreme-Court-blue-sky

Vice President Joe Biden delivered a stern message today to some university students and faculty members

about the obstruction occurring in the U.S. Senate.

It’s threatening the core of our republic, he said. Senate Republicans must not obstruct President Obama’s effort to fill a Supreme Court vacancy; they must allow nominee Merrick Garland to have a hearing, then they must debate the merits of his nomination and they must then vote on it.

True enough, Mr. Vice President.

But what about those remarks you made in 1992 about whether President George H.W. Bush should be able to nominate someone to the high court in an election year? Today’s Republicans are seeking to block Obama’s pick because this, too, is an election year and they want the next president to make the selection.

The GOP has beaten the vice president over his remarks then.

What they don’t sayĀ is that Biden also declared that he would support a “consensus candidate” in an election if one were to be presented to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Biden chaired at the time.

Biden told the Georgetown law students and faculty members: “Dysfunction and partisanship are bad enough on Capitol Hill.Ā But we canā€™t let the Senate spread that dysfunction to another branch of government, to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

It’s fascinating to me that then-Sen. Biden’s remarks now have become known as the “Biden Rule,” which hasĀ never existed.

I won’t defend Biden for making his remarks in 1992. He was wrong to suggest that a sitting president shouldn’t be allowed to perform his job if he had been given the chance to do so. President Bush did select a Supreme Court justice in 1991, when he nominated Clarence Thomas to take the seat vacated by the death of Thurgood Marshall.

However, I won’t condemn Biden for holding that view. He did, after all, add the caveat that he would support a consensus candidate for the Supreme Court.

The here and now stands on its own.

The vice president is correct to insist that today’s Senate should stop its obstruction and allow the president to fulfill his constitutional duty — and do its own duty to give an eminently qualified nominee the fair hearing he deserves.

 

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Listen to the VP, senators, about doing your job

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biden

Vice President Joe Biden is going to lecture the U.S. Senate on something about which knows a thing or two.

He wants his former colleagues to do the job they took an oath to do, which is vote on whether to approve a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Biden will deliver his messageĀ in remarks at Georgetown University.

At issue is the nomination of Merrick Garland to fill the seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia. Senate Republicans — many of them, anyway — are digging in on the nomination. They don’t want to consider a Barack Obama appointment, contending that it’s too late in the president’s second term. He’s a “lame duck,” therefore, the task of appointing a justice should fall on the next president.

That, of course, is pure malarkey.

Barack Obama is president until Jan. 20, 2017. He wants to fulfill his constitutional duty and he’s urging the Senate to do so as well.

Oh sure. The balance of the court is hanging here. Scalia was a devout conservative ideologue — and a brilliant legal scholar. Garland is a judicial moderate; he’s also a scholar; a man viewed widely as supremely qualified.

How does Biden — who served in the Senate for 36 years before being elected vice president — figure in this?

As vice president, he’s the presiding officer of the Senate. Of course, he votes only to break ties. He doesn’t actually run the place. That task falls on the majority leader, who happens to be a Republican, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

It’s been McConnell’s call to obstruct this nomination.

Biden, though, does have a number of friends in both parties who serve in the Senate. Is there any hope that he can get through to them? Probably not, but when you’re vice president of the United States, you have the bully pulpit from which to preach an important message to those who need to hear it.

 

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Oh, that silly thing called ‘public comment’

bidenjoe_102015getty

A member of my family challenged me earlier today to recall a statement from a politician that seemed to contradict what President Obama has said about his upcoming nomination for someone to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The president wants the Republican-controlled Senate to give the nomineeĀ a fair and thorough hearing and then a vote in a “timely fashion.” Democrats are angry that GOP senators are pledging that whoever gets the nod won’t get a committee hearing, let alone a vote.

One of those angry Democrats is Vice President Joe Biden.

Oh, but wait. He said something different in 1992 when a Republican was president. Then-Sen. Biden said President George H.W. Bush shouldn’t get a Supreme Court nominee approved in an election year.

My family member brought that statement to my attention and asked me whether I opposed it then.

My answer? I couldn’t remember the statement, let alone what I thought about it at the time.

White House defends Biden

The vice president has said that the statement has been “taken out of context.” Biden says that he added later in his Senate floor remarks that he’d consider a nominee if he or she were a moderate; Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time.

I, too, believe the Senate should consider a presidential appointment to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Which brings me back to where we started.

We hear so many things through so many channels, venues, forums and information-delivery systems that most of us can’t remember who said what, when they said it and in what context they said it.

If I’d heard itĀ at the time I likely would have condemned it. However, that’s a hypothetical event, which politicians say they dislike. I’ll concede that I probably didn’t hear Sen. Biden say what he’s now acknowledged he said.

Sure, Biden would be wrong — if he favored obstructing future high court nominations and left it at that. He says now he had more to say than what’s being reported.

Fine …

None of thisĀ justifies today’s Senate leadership vow to obstruct the current president from filling a seat on the Supreme Court.

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Justice Biden? Maybe?

biden

I’ll toss a name out there for President Obama to consider for the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Joseph Biden.

The vice president told Rachel Maddow last night that he has “no interest” in serving on the court. The MSNBC host had asked him directly if he’d consider the appointment if it were offered. He has “no interest.”

Is that a blanket, categorical refusal to serve? No. It isn’t. It means, more or less, the same thing as when a politician says he has “no intention of running” for a particular office.

“No intention” can be parsed to mean that “no intention … at this moment.” So, when a politician says he or she has “no interest” in a particular job, one can possibly suggest that the pol is speaking in the present tense.

BidenĀ predicted thatĀ Obama will pick a centrist. He said the president won’t likely pick a flaming liberal jurist in the mold of William Brennan to fill the seat vacated by shocking death of archconservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

He’s also said that a nominee should have GOP support.

Hmmm. Let me think. Who might that be?

Oh, how about the vice president? He’s got many Republican friends in the Senate. He’s proven his ability to work well with GOP lawmakers. He once chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee.

My hunch is that he’d be more of a moderate than a flamer.

OK, he’s also pretty long in the tooth. He might not want to stay in the public eye. The vice president has had a long public service career — and he’s just lost his beloved son, Beau, to cancer. Not only that, the president has given him a task to lead the effort to find a cure for the killer disease.

However, as a fan of the vice president, I happen to think he might be one court candidate who could pass senatorial muster.

 

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Obama should have decided to attend funeral

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chapman.0830 - 08/29/05 - A Supreme Court headed by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has questions for Chapman University Law School professor John Eastman as he and California Attorney General Bill Lockyer argue the 1905 ''Lochner v. State of New York'' case during a re-enactment Monday afternoon at Chapman University. (Credit: Mark Avery/Orange County Register/ZUMA Press)

No one asked me for advice on this, but I’ll offer it unsolicited — and without reservation.

President Obama should have decided to attend the funeral this weekend for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

To me, it’s a no-brainer.

The president will not attend. Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, are going to attend, as they share Scalia’s Catholic faith.

But look at it this way. The optics of seeing the president of the United States paying his respects at the funeral of someone with whom he had profound political and judicial disagreements are invaluable.

Yes, the president will attend a ceremony at the Supreme Court building to honor the late justice. He also has been quite gracious in his public comments in reaction to the shocking news of Scalia’s death while on a hunting trip in West Texas.

Indeed, some on the right have given ObamaĀ a pass on attending. Scalia’s own son even has suggested that the president made the right call by deciding against attending the justice’s funeral.

However, Obama hasĀ given his fierce critics in the conservative media ammunition now to fire at him for declining to attend the funeral. White House press officials haven’t disclosed how the president will spend Saturday while much of official Washington and the nation’s legal community is honoring the memory of Justice Scalia. My hope is that he lays low and spends it quietly.

He’s got a huge decision to make — possibly within the next few days. It involves his choice to succeed Scalia — a gigantic and booming voice for conservatives on the court. Senate Republicans don’t even want to consider an appointment. Others insist that the president make the choice. I am one of those who believes the presidentĀ should fulfill his duties by selecting a nominee for the high court.

OK, so no one asked me for my opinion about the funeral. Why should they? I’m way out yonder in the political peanut gallery far from the government epicenter.

It’s just that as someone noted in theĀ linkĀ attached to this blog post indicated, if you’re questioning whether you should go to the funeral … go to the funeral.

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Hey, Hillary . . . it’s time for a message

hillary

Chris Hayes is a smart young analyst who works for MSNBC.

Last night he offered a most interesting assessment of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.

It’s that she lacks a message.

Hayes noted that U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ big win in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday came because of his clear mantra: He intends to break up the big banks and drive relentlessly for income equality.

I’m not endorsing or condemningĀ Sanders’ overarching theme. It’s clear as a bell, however.

Hayes’ assessment of Clinton’s message? It’s that she’ll do a good job and that she’s well-prepared to be president of the United States of America.

“That’s not a message,” Hayes said.

Bingo, young man!

She now finds herself playing catch-up with Sanders, who walloped Clinton among young voters who — I should add — appeared to actually turn out Tuesday to vote for their candidates.

It wasn’t Clinton.

Should Clinton be in panic mode? I’m thinking she has time to pull it together.

South Carolina is the next stop on the presidential primary parade route. The former senator/secretary of state can harvest plenty of votes there from a huge African-American base. Here is where she needs to enlist some serious help from her husband, the 42nd and unofficial “first black president” of the United States.

Clinton can paper over all she wants about the expected outcome in New Hampshire. The truth is she got walloped.

Chris Hayes had it right. She lacks a coherent message that resonates with voters who have a serious gripe about what they perceive is wrong with the political system.

Oh, I know too that she’s got those other issues hanging over her. Those e-mails, Benghazi, a perceived lack of authenticity . . . blah, blah, blah.

This once-invincible candidate is now looking, well, a lot less formidable.

Are you standing by, Vice President Joe Biden?