Joe Biden, Senator from Citibank (oops, DELAWARE), to Run for President

right, because he is the Senator from Delaware. when he is President, he won't be from Delaware anymore.

also, is there some way that this is equivalent to being especially bad & shameless wrt EVERY industry (tho the drug companies especially, in Frist's case)?

perot was the glitch - a third-party contender bcz he was RICHER THAN CROESUS he holed bush's vote then collapsed himself: that's a pretty rare circumstance; i don't believe clinton wd have smashed through bush's defences on his own

clinton second time was merely a successful amd popular incumbent, so not a glitch winner then, no

(i somewhat doubt he would, given what a fuck-awful show he put on)

the exit polls in 92 matched the results. and maybe Kerry did win.

"difft kind of battle in a very difft situation" is actually the general point i am makin: biden seems to me the poster-boy of "if things play out the way they did last time, it's OUR TURN"

Bush could be assassinated by then.

Did many know who the hell Clinton was outside Arkansas before the 1992 election?

Let Biden try. I'm voting for the best guy.. if McCain runs and wins the nomination for the Repubs and someone like Biden or Lieberman wins the Dem nomination, I'm considering McCain..(and i stress "considering")

IF that happens, so much for what a Dem or Repub means.

I did -- but that was because of his hilariously long and bad speech for Dukakis at the 1988 convention, when I cared about such things. ;-)

Larger point's taken, though. It's still 2005. Right now I'm waiting on the midterm elections and those are still a year and a half away anyway.

re biden and his "constituent services" (i.e., being citibank's and MBNA's bitch): it isn't as if the credit card companies have ever been hurting for cash. before the bill, they were very profitable and had the bill NOT passed they would have remained very profitable. (hint: their rationale for all of their outrageous fees and rates were to protect themselves should their cardholders go bankrupt -- well, now that THAT has been taken care of, let's see if those fees go away & the rates drop [fat chance].) this wasn't exactly like some senator fighting to stop the closure of a military base (the biggest and perhaps the only employer in his state).

my hot button issues are economic ones. if a democratic nominee votes for ANY of the following: (a) the bankruptcy bill; (b) the permanent repeal of the estate tax; (c) makes ANY sort of deal on privitizing social security; then they are O-U-T in my book. i'm sorry to get all naderite here on those issues, but they cut to the core of what the democrats are supposed to be about. if they vote wrong on ANY of those, then they are damaged goods and i honestly don't give a fuck what their stances are on other issues.

that said, it's still early and i doubt that biden's gonna get anywhere anyway. he's damaged goods.

anyhow i'll vote for biden if he gets the nod - i like him more than i ever liked gore - but i'm hardly crazy about him. i'm hardly crazy about anyone in the race as of yet (but i could be by winter 07)(and living in a redass county in a redass state part of me really can't wait to get a 'Hillary' bumpersticker), but i'm hardly snickering 'it's the same old, same old situation, same old ball and chain'. would i like whatever a 68 bobby kennedy looks like in 08? yeah. i'd like to wake up with a stack of hundreds on my pillow too. but just becuz i don't don't mean i don't get out of bed and get to work.

but biden is neither a moderate nor principled. he HAS undercut dean -- and durbin! -- for god only knows what purpose (i think that he's caught a bad case of lieberman-itis, but if his doing so is his way of "acting on principle" then it's REALLY god-help-us time). and sorry, but i think that folks are underestimating how biden's support of bankruptcy reform has made him poison in the primaries.

Yes, the guy's television performances are good and yes, he appears to be a credible realist on foreign policy in the Democratic Party. But the plagiarizing anvil is fatal, assuming that he can even get beyond the loony lefties who will never forgive him for sleeping with the enemy (Big Business.)

Oh, and he's a Senator, too. Save him for a Cabinent pick, Hillary.

Seriously, unless the candidate was exceptionally strong, I cannot see a north-eastern democrat (inc. states like Wis. and Minn. probably?) being elected, unless against a very weak or very extreme Republican...

Clearly they need to go for the person most likely to win, whilst hopefully getting some at least in tune with their 'values'.

Oh yeah, thanks for voting against capping credit card interest rates at 30%, Joe.

Isn't Edwards kinda short, though? I imagine that would be a problem in the eyes of a run-of-the-mill voter, if only on an atavistic level (which is a pretty important level), and no doubt it carries some weight in who the Dems decide to choose as their representative / scapegoat. Kerry looked more "presidential", in terms of the way he carried himself and the fact that he's "straight as a ramrod" or some crap. Of course, then he opened his yap and all that statuesque regalness went pfffffffft.

neil kinnock, rip

that said, i anticipate that he won't even come close to winning the nomination.

-- Eisbär (llamasfur), Sunday, June 19, 2005 3:51 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Link

well, my judgment isn't TOTAL shit at least.

mark s. schooling american political junkies on this thread

hey guys, it's OUR TURN now

we don't need no Joey Biden. tho we might still get him on a ticket.

Biden's "a noun a verb and 9/11" is still my favorite quip thus far.

there's gold in them hair plugs

did Joe Biden kill the Giuliani candidacy? :O

That's not a huge stretch, actually. Biden really put him on the defensive about what had been his biggest (ok, only) selling point.

Of course it was a weakness to be exploited as well. But Biden fucking nailed it, and I love him for that.

from the NYT profile of Credit Card Joe:

During and since his time leading the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Biden has been derided by some critics as the “Senator from MBNA,” or “(D-MBNA),” because of his close ties to the credit card behemoth that was based in Wilmington, Del., until it was bought three years ago by Bank of America.

Employees of MBNA Corporation had heavily contributed to Mr. Biden, pouring more than $214,000 into his campaign coffers going back to 1989, making the company his single biggest supporter, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Moreover, in 2003, after Mr. Biden’s son Hunter had graduated from law school, MBNA hired him as a management trainee and quickly promoted him to executive vice president. After Hunter Biden left the firm to become a partner at a Washington lobbying firm, the company paid him a $100,000 annual retainer to advise it on the Internet and privacy issues. Mr. Biden also paid Hunter’s law firm $143,000 for “legal services,” including nearly $60,000 in outstanding bills just last month.

In another MBNA connection that has raised questions, Mr. Biden sold his Delaware house for $1.2 million in the mid-1990s to John Cochran, a senior executive of the company who would become its chairman and chief executive.

Campaign consultants for Raymond J. Clatworthy, a Delaware businessman who ran twice against Mr. Biden, tried to make an issue of the sale in their race in 1996, suggesting a sweetheart deal, but Mr. Biden produced an appraisal of his home that matched the purchase price.

Mr. Biden became an early supporter of a controversial bankruptcy law that was championed by the company and other credit card issuers and finally passed in 2005, making it more difficult for consumers to erase their debts. Mr. Obama, who voted against the measure, recently skewered the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, for backing the bill, saying it allowed “banks and credit card companies to tilt the playing field in their favor, at the expense of hard-working Americans.”

A report last year by Credit Suisse, the investment bank, concluded the law had had a “profound impact” on the country’s subprime mortgage crisis, leading directly to a rise in foreclosures.

Mr. Obama has made the bankruptcy bill an issue on the campaign trail, announcing a plan in July to revise the law and give more protection to debtors. He has argued that his opposition to the legislation demonstrated his support for working families, while casting Mr. McCain, who voted for the measure, as being in the pocket of credit card and banking industry lobbyists.

in case anyone is curious about what would make vote 3d party -- or not at all -- for president, it is this.

when will tad check in on this one?

Eisbar otm, obv

http://blogs.timesunion.com/jericsmith/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/grinderman.jpg

Cockburn on Biden,

a man so ripely symbolic of everything that is unchanging and hopeless about our political system that a computer simulation of the corporate-political paradigm senator in Congress would turn out “Biden” in a nano-second.

The first duty of any senator from Delaware is to do the bidding of the banks and large corporations which use the tiny state as a drop box and legal sanctuary. Biden has never failed his masters in this primary task. Find any bill that sticks it to the ordinary folk on behalf of the Money Power and you’ll likely detect Biden’s hand at work. The bankruptcy act of 2005 was just one sample. ...

Another shining moment in Biden’s progress in the current presidential term was his conduct in the hearings on Judge Alito’s nomination to the US Supreme Court. From the opening moments of the Judiciary Committee's sessions in January, 2006, it became clear that Alito faced no serious opposition. On that first ludicrous morning Senator Pat Leahy sank his head into his hands, shaking it in unbelieving despair as Biden blathered out a self-serving and inane monologue lasting a full twenty minutes before he even asked Alito one question. In his allotted half hour Biden managed to pose only five questions, all of them ineptly phrased. He did pose two questions about Alito’s membership of a racist society at Princeton, but had already undercut them in his monologue by calling Alito "a man of integrity", not once but twice, and further trivialized the interrogation by reaching under the dais to pull out a Princeton cap and put it on.

In all, Biden rambled for 4,000 words, leaving Alito time only to put together less than 1,000. A Delaware newspaper made deadly fun of him for his awful performance, eliciting the revealing confession from Biden that "I made a mistake. I should have gone straight to my question. I was trying to put him at ease."...

His “experience” in foreign affairs consists in absolute fidelity to the conventions of cold war liberalism, the efficient elder brother of raffish “neo-conservatism”. Here again the ticket is well balanced, since Senator Obama has, within a very brief time-frame, exhibited great fidelity to the same creed....

Why did Obama chose Biden? One important constituency pressing for Biden was no doubt the Israel lobby inside the Democratic Party. Obama, no matter how fervent his proclamations of support for Israel, has always been viewed with some suspicion by the lobby. For half the lifespan of the state of Israel, Biden has proved himself its unswerving acolyte in the senate.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08232008.html

I'll also repost this tweet from the general politics thread, because I think it applies to Biden, too.

Hard to overstate how much better today's moderate Dem senators are than those of 2009, especially on stimulus. One reason I'd guess: Everyone's always fighting the last war, and "Obama's tepid recovery gave us Trump" has finally displaced "weakness on inflation gave us Reagan" https://t.co/eN6axte0PG

— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) January 19, 2021

Everyone's always fighting the last war, and "Obama's tepid recovery gave us Trump" has finally displaced "weakness on inflation gave us Reagan"

Well uh Obama's skin color gave us Trump. Inflation and "we hate the '60s" gave us Reagan.

But, yeah, it's true: we're in a better spot than in 2009.

Also: "we hate black people" also gave us Reagan.

Any analysis of the ascendancy of Trump that doesn’t center him first and foremost as a reaction against the first Black President is wrong, IMO

exactly

He only built a "political" base by screaming bullshit for years about how the black president was fake.

Biden will recognize Guaido as Venezuela's leader, top diplomat says https://t.co/SGNaGb03ur pic.twitter.com/pf2R3AEAQj

— Reuters (@Reuters) January 19, 2021

lol

hoo boy

Make The CIA Great Again

Thinking we might want to hold off a bit before declaring Biden vastly superior to Obama tbh. Maybe let him take a couple of lumps or have a couple of Republicans whine about the deficit.

oh I'll admit American presidents have execrable foreign policy.

Thinking we might want to hold off a bit before declaring Biden vastly superior to Obama tbh

People like hope. Same reason why Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize just for succeeding Dubya and raising high hopes. I'm willing to see what he does, more especially because my influence over what he does will be indistinguishable from nil.

As promised:

Continuing here:
Joe Biden is (currently) President of the United States