Here in the Philly area, our PBS station is based in Wilmington, Delaware. Our media market overlaps with Delaware’s so we were very familiar with Joe Biden long before he became a nominee for vice-president. You’d see him at a Sixers game, or elsewhere around town. And he was often on the nightly news. It’s probably true that liberals from other parts of the country mainly knew Joe from his work on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. If not that, then they remembered him for his work on killing Robert Bork’s nomination or his failure to kill Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. I don’t know if it’s true, now that they’ve gotten to know him better, that liberals really love Joe Biden as much as Karen Connolly wants us to believe. Biden, after all, cast a bad vote on Bush’s biggest foreign policy blunder (the Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq) and his cruelest domestic achievement (the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005). He also had a really inexcusable, hare-brained idea to split Iraq into three pieces that he started pushing during the height of the insurgency there. Joe Biden isn’t right about a lot of things. But there is something about him that Philly liberals will readily acknowledge. It’s kind of captured here:
“He looks just so delighted all the time,” [Annie] Lowrey says. “I’d argue that no one—from John Adams to Dick Cheney—has ever seemed so utterly delighted to be vice president. Such enthusiasm is hard not to like.”
Joe Biden loved being a senator every bit as much as he enjoys being vice-president, and he brought the same enthusiasm to the job. And, because of this, he’s a very hard person to dislike. He’s also unique. Most senators you can fit into some kind of box. You have progressives, blue doggish agricultural/energy types, New Dems, armed services guys, etc. Biden never joined any club or faction. He could be as liberal as fellow Catholics Teddy Kennedy and Pat Leahy, or he could vote with the credit card companies that dominate in his home-state. He could be ridiculously draconian on the War on Drugs and the point man for protecting a woman’s right to choose from Robert Bork. There was always an element of unpredictability about Biden, both in his votes and in what was going to come next out of his mouth. There’s something endearing about that, even if I can’t quite put my finger on it.
As Connolly points out, Biden’s shop has become a liberal oasis in an otherwise pragmatic White House. But I don’t think Biden has changed. He may be with us today on one issue and against us tomorrow on another. The main thing is that he’s loyal, he smart, and his heart’s in the right place. I liked him for vice-president over the other finalists (Tim Kaine and Evan Bayh) and not just for the entertainment value. He’s an asset as vice-president, but I’d be considerably less enthusiastic about him taking over the top job. The same things I find endearing about him as a number two would probably, for the most part, be liabilities for him as a number one.
I hope this kiss wasn’t as sloppy as the one Newsweek laid on him.