Biden’s Baggage
That foreign-policy heft will be hard to carry
By Andrew C. McCarthy
National Review
Tiny Delaware barely registers in the Electoral College, but Barack Obama selected Joseph R. Biden Jr., the state’s senior senator, as his running mate. There’s one explanation: foreign-policy heft. Biden has tons. Obama has none.
Biden, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is the doyen of transnational progressives, Rolodex bursting with this chargé d’affaires and that secretary-general, bookshelves buckling under back issues of Foreign Affairs. Even in scandal, he’s a man of the world: The plagiarism that derailed his 1988 presidential run found him lifting phrases from Neil Kinnock, a fixture of the British Left who steered Labour through serial drubbings. For Democrats and the Council on Foreign Relations crowd, that episode was more an overeager demonstration of good taste than a natural progression from Biden’s earlier misappropriation of a law-review article, which nearly got him expelled from law school. Democrats savor the thought of their Joe lecturing a jejune Alaskan hockey mom on the finer points of ententes cordiales when the candidates debate next month.
But if Iraq is the topic, a more interesting debate would pit Biden against . . . Biden. By comparison, John Kerry is a paragon of consistency: Biden was not merely for the Iraq War before he was against it; he was also against it before he was for it.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
National Review
Tiny Delaware barely registers in the Electoral College, but Barack Obama selected Joseph R. Biden Jr., the state’s senior senator, as his running mate. There’s one explanation: foreign-policy heft. Biden has tons. Obama has none.
Biden, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is the doyen of transnational progressives, Rolodex bursting with this chargé d’affaires and that secretary-general, bookshelves buckling under back issues of Foreign Affairs. Even in scandal, he’s a man of the world: The plagiarism that derailed his 1988 presidential run found him lifting phrases from Neil Kinnock, a fixture of the British Left who steered Labour through serial drubbings. For Democrats and the Council on Foreign Relations crowd, that episode was more an overeager demonstration of good taste than a natural progression from Biden’s earlier misappropriation of a law-review article, which nearly got him expelled from law school. Democrats savor the thought of their Joe lecturing a jejune Alaskan hockey mom on the finer points of ententes cordiales when the candidates debate next month.
But if Iraq is the topic, a more interesting debate would pit Biden against . . . Biden. By comparison, John Kerry is a paragon of consistency: Biden was not merely for the Iraq War before he was against it; he was also against it before he was for it.
posted by Andy W. Rogers | 7:35 AM
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