His Republican foes branded it the “2016 Kickoff Tour” and vice-president Joe Biden made it clear to the people of “my native town, Scranton” that he hopes to build a White House campaign on tales of his humble upbringing in Pennsylvania coal country.
After recently seeming to bolster former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s credentials to be his successor, President Barack Obama went out of his way to give a boost to his No 2.
Their joint appearance on Friday was also significant because coming from a place such as Scranton, an archetype of blue-collar America, is the modern equivalent of growing up in a log cabin.
“This was a signal that [Obama’s] not playing sides,” said Ed Mitchell, a long-time Democratic consultant in Pennsylvania.
“He wanted to be there together with Biden so that people didn’t think that because he’d had lunch with Secretary Clinton and said nice things about her on 60 Minutes that he was favouring her.”
Obama said at Friday’s rally to promote an initiative to make college more affordable that the “reason that I love Scranton is because if it weren’t for Scranton, I wouldn’t have Joe Biden”.
Noting that it was exactly five years since the “special day” that he selected Biden as his running mate, Obama piled on the praise. “It was the best decision that I ever made, politically, because I love this guy . . . and he’s got some Scranton in him,” he said.
Biden grinned broadly, perhaps imagining the campaign commercial that could be crafted from the event. “I tell you, it’s good to be home,” he said, of the city his family moved away from 60 years ago, when he was 10. Scranton was a place “where your heart stays” and where “community, hard work, personal responsibility, faith, family” helped to sustain the American dream.
As vice-president, by rights Biden should be Obama’s heir apparent and in pole position to be the next Democratic choice for the top job. The last occupant of the post to seek his party’s nomination for the White House and fail to land it was Alben Barkley in 1952.
Clinton, however, is viewed as the overwhelming Democratic favourite if, as expected, she chooses to run. A Public Policy Polling survey last month gave her a 59-point lead over Biden in first-voting Iowa. The 1952 analogy is not auspicious for Biden. Barkley was considered too old for the presidency — he was 74, the age Biden will be in 2016.
Supporters of Clinton are quick to point out that she is five years younger than Biden and only Ronald Reagan has been as old as 74 when elected, and that was for his second term in 1984. They also note that in 2008 Biden said that Clinton “might have been a better pick than me” for vice-president.
Biden does not even have the upper hand over Clinton in his birthplace, in part because she also has deep family connections there. Her great-grandparents came to Scranton in the 1880s from Wales, her grandfather worked as a boy at the Scranton Lace Factory and her father is buried in the city.
And while Obama’s words might have seemed an imprimatur, few in Washington will take them at face value. While Obama likes to portray Biden as “the scrappy kid from Scranton who beat the odds”, in large part this is to trade on Biden’s appeal to blue-collar whites, who have been slow to warm to the president’s aloof manner.
Biden’s blunders are legendary, and eagerly recounted by Republicans. The garrulous former senator for Delaware, who served in Congress for 36 years, once told a wheelchair-bound state senator: “Stand up, Chuck — let ’em see you.”
In his book This Town, a dirt-dishing account of the insider world of politics that has become a summer must-read in the American capital, Mark Leibovich describes Biden as “the lovable rodeo clown of the administration”, someone Obama talked about “with a patronising over-fondness — as if the VP were the beloved family dog that kept peeing on the carpet”.
Biden’s two previous runs for the White House were spectacular failures. In 2008, his folksy, long-winded style failed to resonate and he dropped out after securing just 0.9% of the vote in Iowa.
In 1987 he was forced to withdraw when it was revealed that he had plagiarised a speech by Neil Kinnock, then Labour party leader.
He also spoke then about “my ancestors who worked in the coalmines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours”.
It turned out that no known forebears had been miners. A great-grandfather he had thought had been a miner turned out to have been a university-educated engineer.
Steve Corbett, a local radio host, said that Biden was “privileged” in Scranton terms and was not quite the “working-class hero” that he purported to be. “A Biden presidential campaign will be like watching Benny Hill reruns,” he said. “Our Joey will be predictable — he’ll be as stale as a day-old sausage roll and cheeky in his own goofy way.
“In the eyes of most Scranton Democrats, Hillary Clinton has earned the presidency. Bill Clinton is much loved in Scranton and campaigned for Obama here on the eve of the election last year. Her brothers have a family cottage 20 miles away. If you face off with a Hillary-Joe Biden deal, then Hillary’s going to walk all over him.”
Joe Trippi, a veteran Democratic operative who ran Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004, said he did not believe Biden would take on Clinton but it was possible that something unforeseeable might make her decide not to run or leave her weakened.
“He only has one more opportunity at this,” he said. “He’s got to go all out. But he’s a realist and in 2008 he understood very early how the cards were dealt.”
Biden"s Uphill Road to 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment