Is it supposed to be meaningful that Joe Biden spoke to Maureen Dowd back in August about his dying son’s wish that he run for the presidency? Is this really a genuine knock on Biden?
Why?
Because it was Dowd he chose to talk to?
The president sits down with Tom Friedman in the West Wing despite every stupid thing that man has written. And Dowd has a record of Anti-Clinton Derangement that is just as severe as her Anti-Obama Derangement. She even dogged Biden during his 1988 plagiarism scandal. People in the administration talk to columnists at the New York Times even when they think they won’t get a fair shake and even when they think those columnists are morons.
Is is a knock because it was politically motivated, a way of exploiting his son’s death?
Isn’t the story that his son, his face half-paralyzed and his speech badly impaired, sat his father down to implore him to run for the presidency?
Assuming this really happened, and I have no reason to believe that it didn’t, that places Joe in a bit of quandary. What father wouldn’t want to honor his son’s dying wish?
What was he supposed to do with that request?
And if he is taking the request seriously, is it strict opportunism to be honest about why he’s taking a long look at whether a run for the presidency is feasible?
I’ll admit that Biden created an invitation for people to invade his zone of privacy here, where ordinarily simple respect for the grieving would preclude us from even discussing these things, let alone passing judgment on them.
But I don’t see how it’s a knock on Biden that he wants it to be known that Beau asked him to run. Unless you don’t believe the story, this is so central to his thought process that we ought to know about it.
