Rich Lowry uses his latest National Review Online column to compare Vice President Joe Biden to his party’s presidential front-runner.
It’s rare for someone who has been at the pinnacle of our politics for decades to get a second look. But Biden’s latest family tragedy (he lost his first wife and a daughter to a car accident in the 1970s) means that the vice president is viewed through a prism of sympathy, as a grieving father rather than just another politician. And Hillary’s struggles, especially her woodenness, put an accent on Biden’s let-it-all-hang-out, true-to-his-self personality.
You can disagree with Biden, you can mock him, you can cringe at his miscues — but it is impossible not to like him. Hillary’s team can come up with the best, most elaborate plan for her latest makeover (it will emphasize spontaneity, the New York Times reports) and still not come close to matching the bizarre charm of Biden being Biden.
We are constantly assured by people around her that Hillary Clinton is “warm in private.” Biden is warm in public. His performance swearing in new senators earlier this year was a nonstop Bidenesque spectacle of selfies, folksy comments, and general crazy-uncle antics, some of dubious appropriateness. …
… Of course, there is a reason he has run for president twice before unsuccessfully. He blew up his 1988 presidential campaign by stealing the words of British labor leader Neil Kinnock to describe his own life, and kneecapped his 2008 campaign with an insulting description of Barack Obama right out of the gate. But in the age of Trump, “gaffe-prone” doesn’t look like quite the negative it used to be.
Biden is no Trump, but he lacks subtlety and has no filter. If these qualities hurt him in the past, they may serve him better when the public is sick of the typical sound-bite politics.
