Biden Could Beat Trump. But He’s Defeating Himself Instead.
The coming primary isn’t likely to end well for a man who took a six-figure check from a right-leaning group and then praised a Republican just before Election Day last year.
Michael Tomasky
What could Joe Biden have been thinking?
To give a talk last fall, as The New York Times reported Wednesday, in which he praised a Michigan Republican congressman who was locked in a close re-election fight, and for which he pocketed a $150,000 lecture fee from a business-oriented civic group that was known to be strongly Republican-leaning…
I mean, I really would love to know the thought process that led him to the conclusion that making that speech was a fine idea. He goes back to a time when doing a good-natured bipartisan favor for a friend from the other party wasn’t a crazy thing to do. You can lament if you want—and a part of me does—the fact that those days are gone and that you just don’t do that sort of thing in this polarized time of Trump. But gone they are. It is a crazy thing to do.
Biden can’t not know that. He spent eight years in Barack Obama’s White House, for gosh sakes. He knows what’s happened to this country, what the Republican Party has become. He watched them fight the Affordable Care Act tooth and nail. When it passed despite all that, he famously declared it a “big fucking deal,” loud enough so the microphones could pick it up.
Then he watched the Republicans vote to repeal it 60-whatever times. Those didn’t really count since Obama was still president, but then he watched them repeal it in the House again, once Obama was gone. And Biden knows very well that Fred Upton, the GOP congressman he praised in his speech, calling him “one of the finest guys I’ve ever worked with,” voted for the repeal.
That’s important. Fully 20 Republicans did not vote for Paul Ryan’s repeal bill in May 2017. Upton, who is sometimes called a moderate and who had waffled before the vote, could have been one of those Republican dissent-niks. If he had, Biden’s appearance before the group—it has longstanding ties to Upton’s wealthy family, and the speech was in Upton’s 6th Congressional District—might have been sort of understandable.
Actually, even then, no. Upton was in a close race. His Democratic challenger had a shot. Upton ultimately won by 4.5 percent in a district Donald Trump carried by nearly twice that margin. Biden probably didn’t make the difference. But for a former two-term vice president, one of the biggest names in the party, to come into the district on Oct. 16 and lavish praise on the Republican was quite a blow to the loyal precinct Democrats out knocking on doors and working phone banks for candidate Matt Longjohn.
more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/biden-could-beat-trump-but-hes-defeating-himself-instead?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
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