On Joe Biden

Now that VP speculation has centered on Joe Biden, Brad asked me to explain this post of mine in more detail.  So here are some scattered thoughts as to why Joe Biden is a joke.

First, as Jon Chait once wrote, “Joe Biden’s just a barrel of gaffes.”  He seems to do stuff like this all the time:

And remember this controversy:

And with things like this, it’s hard to buy that he’s not just a little more racist than most politicians.   

(And I’m not to sure what to make of comments like this).

Biden’s greatest sin, though, is not the slip of the tongue, or racial insensitivity.  It’s his arrogance. You may remember that he dropped out of the 1988 race for the Democratic nomination after he was caught lifting parts of a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock (not to mention numerous others).  You may not remember that he responded to all this by giving Kinnock a copy of all of his own speeches and offering to let Kinnock copy from them.

Like most Senators, Biden has a special and ridiculous pet cause … cracking down on raves.  You get the sense that people like Biden read one alarmist article in Newsweek and Time and think they’re informed.

If you’ve ever watched Senator Biden question prospective judges (or anyone else in a hearing), then you know that he really, really, really loves to hear himself talk.  Look, I know that all politicians like to hear themselves talk.  Biden is different.  Seriously, watch him at a hearing.  I defy you not to laugh.  Here’s one account:

The reviews for Biden’s first crack at Samuel Alito, the humorless Supreme Court nominee, were murderous. The New York Times had Biden out on Page One — normally a position to kill for — only this time it was not a paean to his considerable merits, but an account of how it took him nearly three minutes of throat-clearing to ask his first question and then took the rest of his allocated 30 minutes just to get in four more. He concluded with about half a minute still left to him — something of a personal best that even he had to acknowledge.

“I want to note that for maybe the first time in history, Biden is 40 seconds under his time,” he told Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, no clipped speaker himself.

The Post had a similar account of Biden running off at the mouth. In that piece, Dana Milbank wrote that during Biden’s round of questioning, he “spoke about his own Irish American roots, his ‘Grandfather Finnegan,’ his son’s application to Princeton (he attended the University of Pennsylvania instead, Biden said), a speech the senator gave on the Princeton campus, the fact that Biden is ‘not a Princeton fan,’ and his views on the eyeglasses of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).”

And like most of the self-obsessed, Biden talks about himself in third person:

In trying to ignite his candidacy, Mr. Biden is trying to change some habits that accompany spending more than half a life as a senator. When asked in an interview about his propensity to speak at great length, he responded with a brief foray into third person, saying: “Yes, that’s the thing Biden has to get over. I’m conscious of it. I don’t always meet it, but I’m working on it.”

And naturally, he overstates his accomplishments:

The famous ego also makes periodic appearances. When the Supreme Court’s rightward drift comes up, the former Judiciary Committee chairman says, “Imagine had I not defeated Robert Bork”—forgetting that he had the help of 57 other senators in rejecting that nominee. 

Now, personally, I don’t like the way that Joe Biden denigrated my favorite legal scholar, Richard Epstein, during the Clarence Thomas hearings.

It’s not enough for Biden to simply take on anyone who expresses a preference for liberty.  He has to belittle them too:

(Biden’s response cost him at least one voter).

Despite all of the above, Obama might choose Biden because (1) for some reason, reporters think Biden is a foreign policy genius, and (2) Biden would easily fit into the role of attack-dog.  But it might be a little awkward for Biden to be an attack-dog against McCain, since Biden publicly supported the idea of Kerry choosing McCain as his running mate just four years ago.  And, for the life of me, I don’t get the fawning of the press over Biden’s foreign policy credentials.  Reporters are always saying things like, “granted, the man has an enormous ego, but he knows his foreign policy.”  That’s absurd.  He knows his foreign policy just ever so slightly more than the reporters who cover the Senate.  That’s not terribly impressive.

Will Obama pick Biden?  It sure seems like Biden is the pick.  I just can’t believe that Obama is going to do it.

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