Subject: Re: Biden should run. Now - Yahoo News
From: "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>
To: "Alexander S. Mackler" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "JRB3" <[email-masked]>, "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2015 09:31:53 -0500

And on point too.

Eric D. Schwerin
[email-masked]

Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 5, 2015, at 9:25 AM, Alexander S. Mackler <[email-masked]>
wrote:

by my count, the most legitimate writer so far to make this argument.

On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 9:01 AM, Eric Schwerin <[email-masked]>
wrote:

>
> http://news.yahoo.com/biden-should-run--now-221648790.html
>
> Biden should run. Now
>
> .[image: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden tosses a stuffed animal to
> children in Villa Nueva on the outskirts of Guatemala City, Tuesday, March
> 3, 2015. Biden gav...]
> It’s doubtful that many voters care as much about Hillary Clinton’s State
> Department emails
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/politics/using-private-email-hillary-clinton-thwarted-record-requests.html?_r=0>
> as reporters do. They’re probably not too wound up over the foreign
> contributions flowing into her family foundation
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/foreign-governments-gave-millions-to-foundation-while-clinton-was-at-state-dept/2015/02/25/31937c1e-bc3f-11e4-8668-4e7ba8439ca6_story.html>,
> either.
>
> Cumulatively, though, these latest headlines about Clinton, along with
> other stories sure to come, reinforce her vulnerabilities as a candidate.
> Democratic primary voters are about to be reminded on a semiweekly basis of
> what left a lot of them so ambivalent about Hillary in 2008 — namely, the
> perception that the Clintons are like an unregulated industry within the
> party, impervious to scrutiny and contemptuous of anyone who would get in
> their way.
>
> And this is why, if I were Joe Biden, and if I still harbored designs on
> the Oval Office down the hall, I’d be inclined to ignore what the insiders
> were saying. I’d run, and I’d run now.
>
> I wrote a few weeks ago about the concerted effort
> <http://news.yahoo.com/my-problem-with-the-clinton-death-star-220134299.html>
> to make Clinton her party’s nominee by acclamation and why I found it
> disturbing. As I said then, she might well be a good president, and
> possibly even an inspiring one, but there’s just something unseemly about
> the liberal reformers of the ’60s generation, men and women who fought to
> create a more democratic nominating process back in the day, now trying to
> back down anyone who would challenge the establishment’s candidate.
>
> The question you hear most often from skeptics, though, is who that would
> be. There’s Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, who apparently went
> after Clinton
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/us/politics/martin-omalley-in-veiled-jab-at-hillary-clinton-derides-politics-of-triangulation.html>
> with a jab at “triangulation” last week, but who hasn’t yet introduced
> himself to most voters or offered any real argument of his own. There’s Jim
> Webb <http://news.yahoo.com/is-jim-webb-for-real-184608862.html>, who
> would probably have a better shot running as an independent. There’s Bernie
> Sanders, who’s an avowed socialist, and Elizabeth Warren, who sounds more
> like a Jacobin.
>
> And then there’s the 72-year-old Biden, who is mostly left out of this
> conversation — not because he hasn’t repeatedly signaled an interest in
> running, but because the handicapping crowd has never taken him all that
> seriously as a foil to Hillary. Biden has a well-known tendency to get
> caught up in the moment and say things
> <http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1895156_1894977_1846609,00.html>
> that are impolitic or even partly untrue, which in Washington tends to make
> you a figure of ridicule, though in most other places it’s known as having
> a pulse.
>
> The accepted wisdom where Biden is concerned is that you can’t have two
> establishment candidates representing continuity from the same
> administration, so the best he can do is to wait on the sidelines, keep his
> options open and hope that maybe Hillary decides to do something else in
> the twilight of her life, like bring a football team to Los Angeles, or
> anchor the “Nightly News” on NBC.
>
> Biden’s instincts have to tell him something different, though. After
> 40-plus years in Washington, he has to know that no one ever really gets
> plucked off the sidelines when the opening arrives; you have to create the
> opening yourself. He has to know, too, that the insiders are almost always
> wrong, and the further out from an actual election you are, the more wrong
> they tend to be.
>
> Biden is a better candidate than most pundits have ever given him credit
> for. Yeah, he’s sloppy and meandering and says some nutty stuff. But that’s
> all part of being genuine and three-dimensional, which may be the most
> valuable trait in modern politics and not a bad contrast to Clinton’s
> robotic discipline.
>
> Not incidentally, Biden is especially popular
> <http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/joe-biden-briefly/> in
> Iowa, where he first campaigned for president in 1988, and where he retains
> unusually strong ties. (The Clintons, you may recall, have never met with
> great affection there.) I remember being struck, in 2008, by the regularity
> with which Iowa Democrats told me that Biden was their second choice and
> would have been first if they thought he could actually win.
>
> Biden’s a middle-class champion who makes the case for economic fairness
> with more conviction than Clinton and less vitriol than Warren. He’s a
> serious thinker on foreign policy who opposes rampant interventionism
> without sounding like a pacifist. He more than holds his own as a debater.
>
> And Biden has nothing to lose by making one last run before riding the
> Amtrak back to Delaware for good. He’s already been through the unthinkable
> death of his first wife and infant daughter in a car crash in 1972; a
> trumped-up plagiarism scandal that very nearly ruined his political career
> in 1988; brain surgery that threatened his life later that same year.
> There’s nothing the Clinton machine can do to the guy that hasn’t already
> been done.
>
> But the main reason I’d tell Biden to run now is that you can’t actually
> know the shape of the Democratic field unless and until you jump into it.
> And that’s because very few people on the planet — possibly only people
> named Clinton — know what’s really in Hillary’s mind, and in her stomach.
>
> We know this about Clinton: She wants to be president and is building a
> formidable organization to make it happen. She doesn’t see any adversary
> who would be a serious obstacle to the nomination, and the insiders pushing
> her to run insist she won’t have to worry about one.
>
> Of course she seems 100 percent determined to run. If you’d offered that
> same deal to Al Gore in 2004, or John Kerry in 2008, or Mitt Romney last
> month, any of them would have grabbed it in a heartbeat.
>
> But if a Biden gets in the race, suddenly that calculus is slightly
> different. Now, if you’re Clinton, you have to ask yourself: Are you really
> up for slugging it out in all those primaries all over again, with the
> nonstop debating and parrying and standing in the bitter cold at 5 a.m.,
> all with the very real chance that you could lose? Do you really want to
> risk your hard-won standing as a stateswoman on a bruising campaign against
> the only politician who has a stronger claim to Obama’s legacy among
> liberal voters?
>
> The answer is probably yes, that Clinton’s a candidate, serious opponent
> or not. But there’s no way for Biden to be sure of that unless he forces
> her to make the choice. Just as important, there’s probably no way for
> Clinton herself to know until the gut check is real.
>
> “I’m in it to win it” was Hillary’s garish bumper sticker when she entered
> the 2008 race. Her party deserves to know that she isn’t running again just
> because her path is clear. And Joe Biden has more than earned the right to
> stand in it.
>
>
> Eric D. Schwerin
> [email-masked]
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>

-- 

Alexander Snyder Mackler
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