I’m gonna go and ahead agree with Ed Kilgore in one sense and disagree with him in another.
With news filtering through Carl Bernstein that Camp Biden is considering a one-term-only run for the White House, it’s natural to speculate what that campaign and, perhaps, presidency would look like.
Ed doesn’t have a problem so much with the pledge to only serve a single term, and I think (concessions to Father Time aside) that it’s a horrible idea.
What’s bothering Ed is the stated rationale for Biden’s run, which can be summed up as “I’m the only guy around here who can work with these lunatics in Congress and get things done.”
Frankly, I think that’s an ingenious campaign strategy and precisely what might work. It even has a patina of credibility, but only because Biden has a better relationship with Senate Republicans than any other Democrat in the country. That doesn’t make him the Green Lantern, and he would still discover that he can’t deal with them, at all. It’s just that there literally isn’t anyone else who could even make the smallest plausible case that he or she can break the gridlock in Washington through better personal relationships with the opposition.
When we look back at Obama’s winning formula, the whole “we’re not a blue America or a red America” thing was that was got people paying attention to him in the first place, and it fulfilled a hope that a lot of people had that someone could unite the country and get us past the incessant bickering in Washington.
Even if you go to Iowa and talk to conservatives, you’ll see that they’ve lost faith in the status quo and want someone who can just detonate the whole political process into a million pieces.
A senior Iowa Republican who is advising another campaign added, “There’s not a single issue people ever point to as the reason they’re supporting Trump. They believe he’ll just blow it up, blow up the system, that somebody needs to blow up the system.”
Over on the left, you’re seeing similar sentiments among stadiums full of Bernie Sanders supporters who no longer want to hear about who is and who isn’t “electable.”
It’s not an ideal time to be a Clinton or a Bush, and if you’re running for Obama’s third-term, you need to explain what’s going to be different. I don’t think Hillary can make a plausible case for that unless she can win so big and has such big coattails that the Republicans are ushered out of power in Congress. It’s not impossible for her to pull that off, but Biden needs his own argument.
So, his argument is basically that he’ll serve just one term and he’ll use it to bridge the divide.
It doesn’t strike me as doable or even necessarily desirable, but as a campaign message it seems spot on to me.
And, yes, I know that Obama paid a price for making a promise he couldn’t keep. He paid a price for trying to keep a promise that could not be fulfilled. But, guess what?
He won. And then he won again.
So, if this is Biden’s plan to explain why he’s needed and Hillary is not, it’s a pretty good one.
And I can’t really think of a better one that doesn’t get down into the weeds of foreign policy and cause some kind of rift within the administration or between the administration and the Clintons.
I guess I am just beyond expecting good policy or realistic promises to equal a winning campaign. Call me cynical, but I’ve learned the hard way.
