Joe Biden

When John McCain’s campaign made it clear over the weekend that their stretch-run strategy would lean heavily on raising questions about Barack Obama’s personal history and past “associations,” Obama’s communications director provided a simple, almost indifferent reaction to The Washington Post: “This isn’t 1988.”

Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential nominee whose campaign was eviscerated that year by tactics ripped from the same playbook from which Mr. McCain now seems intent on borrowing, tends to agree.

“Well, it happens every time,” the former Massachusetts governor said in an interview on the afternoon of Oct. 6 in his college office. “They’re desperate, they’re slipping, and all of that stuff.  read more »

On Thursday night, Fox News' telecast of the Vice Presidential debate attracted more viewers than either MSNBC's or CNN's. The event also ranked as Fox News' highest telecast in the network's 12-year history.

From a Fox News release:  read more »

It's been fashionable to call Joe Biden a "gaffe machine," especially in the run-up to last night's debate, which featured endless suggestions that the Delaware senator would be incapable of restraining himself. But those critics had either ignored Biden's debating history or were oblivious to it, because he has actually been one of the instinctively strongest, most versatile and – yes – self-controlled debaters in politics.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, one parallel between an earlier Biden debate and the challenge he faced against Sarah Palin stood out.  The year was 1972, and Biden was a 29-year-old first-time candidate for the U.S. Senate, challenging 63-year-old Cale Boggs, an institution in Delaware politics. When they debated, Boggs was asked a question about an obscure international treaty. As he fumbled and stammered to produce a coherent response, it became obvious he'd never heard of it. Biden, though, did know about the treaty, and could have jumped in to show it. But he also knew how that would look – the know-it-all-up-start rubbing it in the old man's face. So when it was his turn to speak, all he said was, "Aw, I don't know that one either."  read more »

At the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Rudy Giuliani set the tone for Governor Sarah Palin and the sharp, well-delivered attack speech that brought her to national prominence. Then, last night, after a poor stretch for Palin highlighted by embarrassing interview performances, Giuliani was back to confidently herald Palin’s return to form.

“I mean, this was a fabulous performance,” said Giuliani, walking at a two-step-per-minute rate with his wife, Judith, in a frenzied scrum of reporters in the media center at Washington University in St. Louis on Oct. 2.  read more »

The ingredient that turned the confident, authoritative Sarah Palin that Americans met at the Republican convention into the alarmingly shaky and ill-informed Miss Teen South Carolina clone they saw in her recent television interviews isn’t exactly a secret: follow-up questions.

At the convention, the Alaska governor (and former television anchor) read from a text, threw in a well-timed ad lib and delivered a mesmerizing performance that she’d had a week to rehearse.  read more »

ST. LOUIS—This time, Sarah Palin wasn’t going to let the questions get in her way.

“I may not answer the questions the way either you or the moderator want to hear,” she said. “But I’m going to speak straight to the American people.”

In her closing remarks, she suggested she’d like to debate again and answer questions “without the filter of the mainstream media.”

What she wanted to do was talk about taxes and energy (and energy, and energy). She delivered polished attack lines with derision, and made check-marks on the papers on her podium.  read more »

The McCain campaign says that its decision to pull his campaign operations out of Michigan is no big deal, because there are plenty of other states to compete in. The Obama campaign begs to differ, and jumped on the news today, portraying it as an omen of McCain’s undoing.

In a conference call before the debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden here at Washington University in St.  read more »

ST. LOUIS—Asked by reporters in the media room here at Washington University how nervous he was about tonight’s debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said that he was “an even-keeled five.”

He tried several times to downplay the significance of tonight’s outcome, arguing that, historically, vice-presidential debates have not been decisive in determining the winner of the election.  read more »

Surely one of the pleasures of having a magazine with a 150-year archive is the ability to pull stories from the past and make them a part of the news cycle. On the day of vice presidential debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin, The Atlantic has done just that, presenting "Is the Vice Presidency Necessary?" by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. from May 1974.

Writing a generation before Dick Cheney added unprecedented power to the traditional role of vice president, the late Mr. Schlesinger, a Pulitzer prize winning historian and J.F.K. special assistant, wrote:

[T]he vice presidency is makework. Presidents spend time that might be put to far better use trying to figure out ways of keeping their Vice Presidents busy and especially of getting them out of town. The vice presidency remains, as John N. Garner said, 'a spare tire on the automobile of government.' As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California, there is no there there.  read more »

Here's the press filing center at Washington University in St. Louis where Joe Biden will debate Sarah Palin tonight.

Except for Lynn Sweet, chatting with a couple of the filmmakers who have been working on an Obama documentary since the beginning of the campaign, it's pretty much empty.

It’s obvious now that Sarah Palin’s performance in Thursday’s vice presidential debate is crucial to the G.O.P.’s chances of prevailing in November.

If she lives up the ditzy Tiny Fey caricature that has come to define her, Palin will complete a five-week transformation from political sensation to liability, severely complicating John McCain’s effort to win over swing voters and erase Barack Obama’s slight but steady lead.  read more »

It’s a truism that no one votes for president based on the vice-presidential candidates, so it should follow that a debate between V.P. nominees is about as meaningless as a pre-season football game.

But that’s not quite true. Yes, few (if any) voters actually stare at their ballots weighing the pros and cons of each vice-presidential hopeful. But that kind of analysis is too literal. The performance of V.P. nominees affects the evolution of swing voters’ attitudes toward the presidential nominees during the campaign – and, by far, the debate marks the highest visibility moment for any V.P. candidate. Sometimes, this still doesn’t matter; when there is a mismatch at the top of the ticket, even an awful V.  read more »

In the early morning hours of Wednesday, Sept. 24, The New York Times was printing its morning editions, including a front-page story reporting that Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign manager, Rick Davis, is a principal in a lobbying firm that had been receiving $15,000 a month since 2005 from embattled mortgage giant Freddie Mac.

But before those papers hit doorsteps, the McCain campaign had responded, via its Web site. Much of the morning news cycle was spent recycling the dispute: Had McCain lied? Had his campaign manager lied to him? Was the Times story flawed? And if it wasn’t, was it an example of ‘gotcha’ journalism both Mr.  read more »

CHICAGO--Barack Obama is expected to frame the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill Lynch as indicative of the mismanagement of the economy by Republicans over the last eight years at a campaign stop in Grand Junction, Colorado today. The remarks are part of a more aggressive stance the Obama campaign is taking this week, with vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden arguing that John McCain has changed for the worse and a new ad calling the McCain campaign dishonorable. Obama's remarks, according to Obama staff on the campaign plane, will seek to make the point that with Wall Street imploding, McCain’s stewardship of the economy will be similar George Bush’s.  read more »

MINNEAPOLIS--Both former mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Governor George Pataki had words for Joe Biden at today’s New York delegation lunch.

Giuliani said that Biden’s proposal to devolve Iraq into three separate regions meant that he was “totally oblivious to what that has done to Pakistan and India.”

He then mocked Biden’s gregarious nature: “Joe has a great deal of experience talking, talking, talking.”

Pataki derided Barack Obama’s message of change by saying that, for vice president, Obama “picks Beltway Joe, who has been in Washington for a few hundred years.” He said that the way to achieve reform was to "appoint someone like Governor Palin.”

On a separate note, Pataki, who has been invisible since leaving office and abandoning notions of a bid for national office, declared himself in the game again.

“I’m back,” he said. “I’m getting involved.”

The thinking behind John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin makes sense—on the surface.

No woman has ever been nominated for national office by the G.O.P., so the news will cause a stir, which will help McCain both in the short term—as he tries to deny Barack Obama a meaningful convention bounce—and in the long run, since the 72-year-old McCain has struggled to build excitement and capture headlines.

Plus, Palin is solidly conservative on social issues, so her selection—unlike that of other outside-the-box prospects, like Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge—will sit well with the party base, and perhaps even make the base more motivated.  read more »

The vice presidential selection process can be like the build-up to a big game. The contestants often look roughly even on paper – one with a particular strength in this area, the other with stand-out credentials in that area – and a reasonable case can be made for either’s superiority. But then you actually get to see them on the same field and immediately realize what a gross mismatch it actually is.

A good example of this in sports is the 2007 college football title game, an even-seeming contest between 12-0 Ohio State and 12-1 Florida that quickly turned into a thorough Gator rout.  read more »

A quick review of the most prominently featured speakers over the first three days of the Democratic convention – which ones helped, which ones hurt, and which ones did neither.  read more »

DENVER—Joe Biden spoke, and it was a success. But the ghost of a balding Welshman could yet come to haunt the Democratic convention.

Neil Kinnock, the former leader of the British Labor Party, is best known in American circles as the man from whom Biden borrowed some rhetoric during his abortive bid for the presidency in 1988. Back then, Biden got caught adapting comments Kinnock had made about being the first member of his family to go to college. Although the Delaware senator had credited the British pol for the ideas in previous speeches, one occasion on which he did not do so proved disastrous for his White House hopes, leaving him open to the accusation of plagiarism.  read more »

DENVER—Spike Lee really liked Wednesday night’s speeches.

“Fired up! Fired up!” said the director walking down the main aisle of the Pepsi Center last night. He wore a white T-shirt with Obama’s face on it and a baseball cap. He gave a high five to Newark Mayor Cory Booker, sitting in the front row of the Jersey delegation. “We going to drop double nickels tomorrow night," Lee told Booker, who laughed and nodded his head. "Obama’s going Jordan in the Mile High Invesco field. Double nickels! Double nickels, baby!”

Booker gave his approving reviews. Waving a Biden sign, topped with an American flag, he said the vice presidential nominee had done an exceptional job of showing that John McCain’s “longevity doesn’t equal expertise.  read more »

DENVER—Bill Clinton walked onto the stage of the Pepsi Center on Wednesday night to sustained, roaring and amorous applause. Instead of signs with the names of Obama or Hillary, the hall waved American flags. Every time the ovations seemed to subside, they roared back up again. The time clock above the teleprompter froze at 10 minutes. With the tribute not eating into his speech, Clinton let them applaud. Not that he could have stopped them if he wanted.

When the applause finally died down, Clinton didn’t waste any time putting to rest the speculation about how enthusiastically he would make the case for Barack Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden.  read more »

Joe Biden ran for president this past year and even after giving hundreds of speeches, sitting for countless interviews and participating in more than a dozen televised debates, no one really noticed. He finished at the bottom of the pack in Iowa and dropped out. Half the country had no idea who he was or that he'd even been in the race at all.

Tonight, finally, people noticed. For 30 minutes in prime time, with tens of millions of viewers watching on broadcast and cable television, Biden had the chance to introduce himself, to tell his story and to explain why he's in politics and why he wants to help lead this country – exposure he'd never before had in a political career that has spanned four decades.  read more »

DENVER—You'd really have to strain to see any trace of Bill Clinton's residual primary-season resentments in his ecstatically received convention speech about Barack Obama. For 20 minutes, the former president spoke and, but for a few references to his wife's primary campaign at the very beginning, used his time to talk up Obama and to take on John McCain and the G.O.P.

In particular, Clinton vouched for Obama's national security credentials - his prime vulnerability, the G.O.P.'s eyes - arguing that Obama will work for diplomacy but that "when he cannot convert adversaries into partners, he will stand up to them."

Perhaps more effectively than any other speaker at this convention, Clinton also went after McCain, prefacing his critiques with praise for McCain's heroism and his willingness to stand up to his party on several high-profile issues.  read more »

Only one half of the Democratic ticket is actually set. With this afternoon's acclamation vote, Barack Obama is now officially the party's candidate for president. But Joe Biden, his handpicked running mate, must still win the convention's formal blessing. Technically, the party could go through another time-consuming roll call of the states to nominate Biden, but there's no need for that. Instead, Biden will be nominated just after 10 tonight (after Bill Clinton's speech) by Quincy Lucas, a Delaware woman and domestic violence activist. There will be no seconding speech; to save time, delegates will simply be asked if anyone seconds the nomination -- and hundreds of them will shout back "I do.  read more »

With Bill Clinton scheduled to speak shortly before Joe Biden tonight, it seems a logical question to ask: Will the former president upstage the party's vice-presidential nominee?

This is no small concern for Democrats, since Biden's speech is crucial on two levels. For one, Biden - even though he ran for president this year and has been a staple on Sunday morning newsmaker shows for years - is unknown to tens of millions of voters. A primetime speech carried live by every broadcast network and cable news channel represents his best chance to lock in a favorable impression with these voters. Plus, his speech  read more »

What was missing from Hillary Clinton's otherwise boffo speech last night? She neglected to mention much of anything about the nominee, including why he is ready for the job and will do it well.

Her husband is even less likely to make the case for Obama because they scarcely know each other. And aside from a few perfunctory phone conversations, Obama has done little to improve their relationship.

Indeed, friends of the former president say that the Illinois Senator made matters worse when he rebuffed an invitation to visit Clinton in Chappaqua. It seems obvious that Obama will need his help, between now and November and even more if and when he wins.

Perhaps Obama has realized that pushing Clinton away is the same mistake Al Gore made, for very different reasons. The two sides are now discussing a visit to Clinton's Harlem office sometime soon.

I asked Joe Biden how Hillary Clinton did. "How did she do?" he said. "She blew the roof off."

Also: Corzine called it "the speech of a lifetime and the foundation for victory in the fall."

Joe Biden may be the first presidential or vice presidential nominee ever of a major party to have been a daily Amtrak commuter.

The Delaware Democrat commutes daily on Amtak between Wilmington's train station and Washington's Union Station, a trip that usually takes no more than 90 minutes each way. His running mate, Barack Obama, referred to the commute during the duo's Saturday appearance, describing Mr. Biden as a "scrappy kid from Scranton who beat the odds, the dedicated family man and committed Catholic who knows every conductor on that Amtrak train to Wilmington."

Mr. Biden entered the Senate after his 1972 election.  read more »

DENVER -- Howard Dean came up from behind and clapped Walter Mondale on the shoulder. “Joe Biden,” he said. “Great choice. Great choice.”

It was two glasses into cocktail hour on Sunday evening at the International Leaders Forum, a quadrennial powwow of foreign dignitaries hosted by the National Democratic Institute, an organization that promotes good governance around the world. The NDI is loosely affiliated with the national Democratic Party, which explains why the forum’s opening reception, held at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, attracted both Dean and Mondale, who’d spoken at an earlier panel discussion. (Not to mention House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who gave an opening speech, and a shambling Ted Turner, who politely declined to be interviewed.  read more »

Strictly in terms of the November election, it's fair to liken Joe Biden to Dick Cheney, who was tapped to serve as George W. Bush's running mate in 2000 in an effort to reassure voters who were made uneasy by Bush's thin national security résumé.

The ploy worked for Bush: Cheney, a stern former defense secretary who had overseen the first Gulf War, was celebrated by the media for his "gravitas" -- and he went on to score an unexpected victory in his vice presidential debate with Joe Lieberman. In the same way, Barack Obama hopes that the presence of Biden, a gray-haired 35-year veteran of the Senate who's on a first-name basis with numerous world leaders, will make it easier for voters to pull the lever for a presidential candidate who was a member of the Illinois state legislature less than four years ago.  read more »

Barack Obama, it seems clear, selected Joe Biden as his running mate both to compensate for a lack of official foreign policy experience and because the Delaware Senator can be a forceful and aggressive voice in a campaign that could use some toughening up.

Biden spoke to some of those concerns well over a year ago, during a lengthy interview back in February 2007 in a Delaware diner, in which he attributed the Democratic Party’s failure to win the last two general elections to timorousness and questioned whether Obama was prepared enough to lead the country.

“I think one of the things wrong with my party is that we are too timid,” Biden said at the time.  read more »

Exactly 21 years ago on Saturday, Joe Biden opened his mouth and inflicted a mortal wound on his White House aspirations – and, it seemed, his entire future in national politics.

The setting was the Iowa State Fair and the occasion was the second debate between the candidates for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination – dubbed “the Seven Dwarves” by unimpressed pundits. The 44-year-old Biden had spent the summer tangling with Michael Dukakis, Paul Simon and Richard Gephardt for the front-runner’s mantle, after the May implosion of Gary Hart – and the results, thanks to his youth, energy and impassioned oratory, had been encouraging.  read more »

For most of the summer, Biden contracts were trading at around 10 on the Intrade political market, while Evan Bayh contracts traded much higher – peaking at 40 about 10 days ago. But look at what’s happened in just the last day, as the media has begun portraying Biden as the most likely selection.

Other notable values on the Democratic V.P. market: Tim Kaine is now trading at 15.4, which is actually up slightly from yesterday, and Kathleen Sebelius is at 14.8 – almost a five-point jump for her from yesterday. Hillary Clinton is at 9.3, unchanged from yesterday. But maybe we shouldn’t read too much into this: Wesley Clark is at an absurdly overvalued 13.8.

On the Republican side, Mitt Romney is top at 31.1, followed closely by Tim Pawlnety at 29.9.

Maybe it will be Joe Biden after all. The buzz around him is only increasing. Here’s what Howard Fineman reported just a few minutes ago:

Within the last few hours I've spoken with two of the finalists for the role of Barack Obama's running-mate, and to two other sources who are close to the process.

My bottom line is this: Barring a big surprise or last-minute change of heart, the choice is likely to be Sen. Joe Biden of Deleware [sic] chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee….

"If I had to bet my life on it, I'd bet it is Joe," said one of the other contenders.

 read more »

...or does this just mean that he talked to Joe Biden's son, Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden? (Note: Halperin seems to have belatedly familiarized himself with the spelling of Beau's first name, thus making it clear to whom his post refers. His earlier version featured a different spelling, suggesting some kind of cryptic allusion involving former two-sport athlete Bo Jackson.)

I can’t help but think of Bob Kerrey right now. In 1992, the then-Nebraska senator (and current New School president) was one of Bill Clinton’s two vice-presidential finalists, and conventional wisdom strongly suggested Kerrey would get the nod.

The reason was simple: Clinton was an inexperienced small-state governor whose Vietnam draft avoidance would be a major issue in the fall – especially since he was running against a World War II hero, George H.W. Bush. The presence of Kerrey, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran widely celebrated for his sacrifices, would inoculate Clinton against the G.O.P.’s ugly attacks, just as Kerrey’s Senate experience would complement Clinton’s gubernatorial resume.  read more »

O.K., so this may prove to be one of those flare-ups that’s extinguished and forgotten before anyone really notices, but there’s plenty of chatter in the blogosphere today about the striking similarities between the moving personal anecdote from his Vietnamese captivity that John McCain recounted at Saturday’s Saddleback forum and one that the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn told from his gulag days.

Here’s what McCain said on Saturday night, to a question about what his faith in Christ means to him personally:

It was Christmas Day. We were allowed to stand outside of our cell for a few minutes, and those days we were not allowed to see or communicate with each other, although we certainly did.

 read more »

The prospect of Joe Biden joining Barack Obama’s ticket, which seems to have grown more real in recent days, raises an interesting possibility: another Biden presidential campaign.

Given how his campaign turned out this year, the idea of Biden ever seeking the White House again seems (and probably is) unlikely. But, at least in theory, a tour de force performance as the VP nominee – think Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 – could spark popular interest in a future Biden presidential campaign that was missing in this past one. If Obama were to lose, Biden (again, theoretically) might then have a shot at the 2012 nomination (much the way the ’92 nomination was essentially Bentsen’s for the taking after his ’88 performance).  read more »

If, as I have argued relentlessly that he should, Barack Obama decides that an established reputation for national security and foreign policy expertise is a prerequisite for any potential running-mate, the question then becomes: Who passes t