It's getting weird out there in these dog days of the Democratic presidential nomination race ahead of the Big One in 2020.
Departing from his nonstop praise for President Obama, former vice president Joe Biden came up with this doozy in his interview with the New York Times. Here's the money quotes picked out by Breitbart:
Former Vice President Joe Biden admitted "a lot of people were left behind" during his and President Barack Obama's tenure in the White House.Biden, who has pitched himself as the only Democrat capable of winning back the white working class in 2020, made the admission when being interviewed for a profile in The New York Times that was published on Tuesday."A lot of people were left behind," the frontrunner said when discussing the Obama administration's efforts to combat the recession. "In areas where people were hard hit, I don't think we paid enough attention to their plight."
So some kind of reality has dawned on him. He's noticed the Obama-era meth addicts and hollowed out cities, made that way by the Obama "you didn't build that" agenda, but not quite enough to recognize that a large portion of Trump voters were actually well educated.
None of this makes Biden look like someone you'd like to elect president.
Three possibilities are there for what is going on.
One, Biden has cut ties with President Obama and no longer expects to get that prized, coveted endorsement from him. He's been sucking up for months for it, and all signs point instead to Obama tilting toward Kamala Harris. The fact that Obama failed to endorse Biden at this point, after all those years of faithful service, was quite a slap in the face for loyal old Joe, who stood at Obama's side no matter what he did. These Biden remarks suggest that maybe he's realized this and is distancing himself, even as the Breitbart report noted that he tried to soften the blame. Nope, blame is blame, even with sugarcoating.
Two, Biden is trying to draw negative attention to Obama...to deflect from all the stuff he didn't bother to do. According to Breitbart:
Despite the confession, Biden stopped short of laying the culpability on Obama. Instead, he claimed the president and others were preoccupied by more pressing issues during their eight years in office."Everything landed on the president's desk but locusts," Biden said in describing the early days of the administration. He added that Obama was so busy he "didn't have time to breathe."The former vice president attributed the "lack of messaging" and Obama's reluctance to "promote his successes."
Obama was busy? Where the heck was Joe, then? Vice presidents are supposed to be there to do all the work the president can't do, such as go to funerals. Biden declaring Obama busy only raises the question about what Biden was doing. Was he doing anything at all — other than meddling in the internal affairs of Ukraine in the name of business deals? Biden, like Obama, had his priorities — and helping deplorables wasn't one of them. So now he's trying to pin the whole thing on Obama.
Third, it may just signal that Biden doesn't have a strategy at all, just bits and pieces and parts and particles, and he likes the sound of his voice to interviewers. He's popping off and doing gaffes. He doesn't recognize that what he's saying is damaging to him because of what it reveals. What could it reveal? That he's bitter at Obama, that he was a lazy, shiftless, do-nothing vice president, that he doesn't know what he's talking about. What a picture of incompetence.
There aren't any other scenarios. Biden's remarks on this, after years of effusive praise of the Obama years, is some kind of truth coming out. Truth is not going to help old Joe.
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