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Letting Joe just be ... Joe
Champ's Joe, not Rantburg's Joe, though our Joe is both more entertaining and better spoken...Down-home and laid-back, Joe Biden has been traveling the country saying what few politicians could about their opponents, for better or worse. Mitt Romney is "etch-a-sketchy," the vice president said this week. Last month, he told a Hispanic audience: "Romney wants you to show your papers, but he won't show us his." Funny, Joe. Did you boss ever show his papers? Biden has a long history of edgy verbal blurts -- in 2007, he described then-Sen. Barack Obama as "articulate" and "clean," a comment he later said he regretted. But in the week since his blustery debate with GOP vice-presidential nominee Ryan, Biden seems to have found a slightly different niche -- a more deliberate delivery of his sometimes-outrageous utterances. He offers these with a smile, relishing the stage, often punctuated by a "Whoa!" After 30 years in D.C., he should be well trained in theatrics. Campaign officials have decided to let Joe be Joe. "He has an ability to connect and communicate in a clear and effective way," Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in recent interview. "He, like the president, embodies an American success story." Yes, middle-class guy goes to law school, enters politics and rises to high office. What's more American than that? Republicans say Biden has repeatedly crossed the line of decorum, and political analysts wonder whether he's gone so far as to become unpresidential. "Today's over-the-top rhetoric by Vice President Biden is disappointing, but not all that surprising," Ryan spokesman Brendan Buck said after Biden's "bullets" remark this week. "In the absence of a vision or plan to move the country forward, the vice president is left only with ugly political attacks beneath the dignity of the office he occupies." William A. Galston, an aide to President Bill Clinton who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said he's "never seen a less presidential demeanor from a national candidate." Biden has twice run for president and has not ruled out a third attempt in 2016. When O could be his Veep. Polls show both sides of the coin. More than three in four Democrats view Biden favorably, but among all registered voters, the vice president is much less popular than he was as a running mate in 2008. In a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press survey early this month, Biden was viewed favorably by 39 percent of voters and unfavorably by 51 percent. In fall 2008, more than half of voters had favorable views of him. That'd be those who voted for the Lightbringer and his Archangel. "Joe Biden is Joe Biden, and he was elected to the Senate before the age of 30 and has been absolutely the same from the beginning of his political career to the end, if this election is the end," Galston said. Posted by: Bobby 2012-10-20 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=354240 |