Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Run Joe, Run!   [Jonah Goldberg]

Snort, chortle, guffaw. The buzz is heating up that Joe Biden might be running for president in 2016. I would hate to circumscribe any of the myriad jokes one can make in response to this news. But let me for a moment take this idea seriously. One must immediately concede that Biden is in his own bubble all the time. If I didn't know better, I'd have guessed that he ghostwrote Muamar Qadaffi's U.N. speech last week. So, saying Biden is deluded is not necessarily a sign of larger White House delusions. The bubble he's in may simply be like a spaceman helmet rather than a White House bubble. Still, to some extent, this idea has fluorished in an administration that may be misreading the extent of its own success. The notion that Obama will serve a second term at all is not at all a foregone conclusion, never mind the hope he will have the kind of coattails that will carry a 74-year-old punchline like Joe Biden into the Oval Office. Only two sitting VP's have been elected directly to the White House. Show of hands: Who thinks Biden will be number 3?*

Then there's the more basic problem that Joe Biden is completely out of his gourd if he thinks he can be elected to the presidency one day. He's tried twice and went nowhere for a reason. Most people can't take him seriously. The fact that he's vice president doesn't really change that. Indeed, Obama has been cynically — even cruelly — playing up the fact that Biden's a joke. When he declared "Nobody messes with Joe!" in his first address to Congress Obama might as well have mussed up his hair and given him a lollipop. I think it's kind of mean for the press to encourage him.

* Sorry, I should have said since 1804 (when Veeps and Presidents started running on the same ticket thanks to the 12th amendment), only two sitting V.P.s have been elected directly to the presidency (Martin van Buren and G. H. W. Bush). I believe Richard Nixon is the only former vice president to be elected president without the benefit of first being an unelected president (i.e. through the death or resignation of his boss). The point is, we generally don't willingly promote any vice presidents to the job.

09/29 11:29 AMShare