By Michael Tomasky
Everyone seems to think he’s running. No one has any idea why he would.
Gossip started flying over the weekend that Joe Biden is about to say something. On Monday, CNBC tweeted: “Joe Biden to announce whether he is running for president in 2016 or not in the next 48 hours, sources tell @NBCNews.”
So
there we are. The big moment is nigh. Generally speaking, insiders
think he’s getting in. The folks in Clintonland certainly seem to think
he’s getting in.
I don’t, however, know a single person I’m aware of who wants
Biden to get in. And I’ve been asking. Journalists, activist types,
policy wonks, political operatives—among them, the consensus is that he
let all this dangle a little too long and that he doesn’t really bring
anything to the table that isn’t already on offer from the existing
candidates.
A Biden candidacy was always a bad idea, in part for reasons I wrote about back in early August: no real rationale, no major policy differences with Hillary Clinton, he’ll just end up attacking her trustworthiness if he wants to get anywhere.
In
the 10 weeks that have passed since I wrote that column, it’s only
become a worse idea. First of all, Biden’s polling performance isn’t so
hot. He’s third, behind Clinton and Sanders. He’s been pretty steady for the last two months,
at 15 to 20 percent. So it’s not as if he’s lost ground, but the
general assumption in politics is that once a person announces, he slips
a bit in the polls because he goes from being a neat hypothetical idea
to someone whose warts the electorate actually begins to contemplate
(and whom the press begins to scrutinize). He’s also third in Iowa, and a pretty distant third in New Hampshire. Oh, and third in South Carolina, too,
25 or 30 points behind Clinton. Polls can change of course, they often
do. But there’s no obvious reason to think they’re going to change much
here, for such a known quantity as Joe.
Click here for the full article.
Source: The Daily Beast
No comments:
Post a Comment