I feel kind of like the folks at NewHounds (we watch FOX so you don't have to). I wouldn't have done it by choice, but I was loading brick and the radio was tuned to NPR when On Point's hour with Joe Biden came by, so I figured I'd let it roll on and see if the man brought anything to the table. After all, even Kos says something good about him every now and then (though I just spent ten minutes searching and couldn't find the reference I'm remembering).
So I gave him a chance.
Didn't work. He's still a frog.
The man said two things that stood out, and I'm sure that he meant them to stand out.
Questioned about why Congress pulls such poor favorability numbers in every poll, Biden pulled out the hoary chestnut of
"It's the bickering and the partisanship. People want legislators to reach across the aisle and that's what I try to ....."
You get the idea, and if you're on this site you know how stupid it is, and what the real answer is. Congress polls poorly because we expect them to rein in this president and they're not doing it. But I have another take on this sentiment that I'll come back to later.
The other statement was about Iraq. For a guy who has been thinking and talking about Iraq for a long time his position on it, or at least his talking point version of his position on it is beyond stupid, but I'll take a minute to pound on it just the same. Paraphrasing, he said
"Some of the other candidates say they'll just pick up and leave, no residual force, no nothing, pick up and go. Well, what about the four thousand people in The Green Zone. How are we going to protect them?"
Now I know this looks like a prime example of a quote snipped artfully out of context but it really isn't. Go to the tape. He said it more than once too. What about those four thousand people. WTF?
Here's a clue Joe. Now assuming that you're talking about Iraqi collaborators and not our people staffing the SuperEmbassySecretSpyBaseMilitaryAdventureLaunchingPad then the answer is - If those four thousand people want to live, they come with us when we leave. If they want to take their chances, they stay behind.
If he's talking about just protecting the staff of our super embassy, then the trouble for Joe is even worse. Because his solution is:
"you'd need to leave 10,000 troops there just to protect those people"
So his solution to a mess created by throwing the Army in where it wasn't needed is to leave a division there basically forever. Think the super embassy with its super troops and its super spies isn't going to turn into a symbol (if not the actual mechanism) of the US malignant effect on the Middle East. Nah, the Iraqis are smarter than that. They'll understand.
So generally speaking, Joe cast his lot with the DLC position on the war and is trying to position himself as The Man Who Will Do Iraq Right, not as the man who can cut the cord with past policy, admit its bankruptcy and start picking up the pieces. Put it this way - he didn't earn my vote there.
But I wanted to go back to the first point, the bipartisan crappe because that particular quote, that 'people' want an end to The Bickering comes up so often, and seems so sincerely believed that it occurred to me that there may be more to it than I initially thought.
When a Democratic legislator says
People are tired of the bickering
I've started to hear
People are bickering with me and I'm tired of it
Viewed through that prism, the statement goes from stupid to just arrogant and narcissistic, which is much more plausible.
I'm not a shrink, but I do manage people, and see versions of this behavior all the time. Underperformers take the unhappiness that colleagues feel about their poor performance and turn that into the reason for their poor performance. The old "I come in late and leave early because there's such a bad vibe around here" defense.
The other thing I hear in the "people are tired of the bickering" whine is genuine exhaustion. In a lot of ways the Democratic Party is the Yankees - the 08 Yankees not the 00 Yankees. A few young bucks and a bunch of old superstars. When I look at our team, especially in the Senate, I see a bunch of guys who are too old or who need a change of scenery to regain their sense of purpose.
That's all. My fifty cent analysis of Joe Biden, the Party and the discourse.