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| Bush makes nice with Biden |
| 2001-09-24 |
Twenty-four hours after launching what his aides touted as an assault on President Bush and his foreign and defense policies, Senator Joseph Biden found himself accepting the president's thanks. As members of Congress scattered following last Tuesday's attack - some to their homes, some to Capitol Hill bars, some to protected locations - Bush phoned the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from Air Force One to express his gratitude. "He thanked me for my words of support," says Biden. On his way home to Delaware with Pennsylvania Rep. Robert Brady, Biden assured Bush of his continued backing. "Whatever I can do, I'll do." To use a grim adaptation of the old cliché: What a difference a day makes. The day before the attack, Bush's relationship with Senate Democrats generally, and Joe Biden specifically, could not have been more strained. On top of unrelenting criticism on the budget - now, practically meaningless - Democrats were preparing a fresh attack. Shortly before he was scheduled to speak at the National Press Club last Monday, Biden's staff eagerly distributed an article from that morning's Los Angeles Times. According to the paper, Biden was going to lead an "assault" by his party on President Bush's foreign policy, a "policy offensive" focused on Bush's proposal for missile defense funding. Senate Democrats would "challenge the Bush administration's vision of threats to the United States in the post-Cold War world," because they saw "a political vulnerability on foreign policy." Biden's speech was beyond blunt. The president's missile defense policy was deemed "nonsense," his advisers "relics of the Cold War." Missile defense opponents maintain that the speech was prophetic. "The real threat comes to this country in the hold of a ship, the belly of a plane, or smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack," Biden argued. To hurt the United States, he asked rhetorically, are you more likely to fire a missile, or "put somebody with a backpack crossing the border from Vancouver down to Seattle, or coming up New York Harbor with a rusty old ship with an atom bomb sitting in the hull?" But it's not likely to have a place in any future Biden press kit. The Press Club speech - and a preview of it on Meet the Press the day before - was to have been just one element in a sort of coming out week for Biden. Often mentioned as a potential 2004 challenger to Bush - speculation he has not discouraged - Biden was all set to play an important adversarial role in two high-profile confirmation hearings.... Outside the Capitol shortly after the Negroponte hearings on Thursday, Biden was full of praise for Bush. "The president, God love him, has an overwhelmingly difficult job right now," Biden said. "There is a coalescing of liberals, conservatives, moderates, everyone. And I think the administration is doing a hell of a job." |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |