Biden Getting Ready To Step Aside?

First of all, it was not a “total media pass”. It was reported in the AP and in the Arizona Republic, at least. It was reported in the major newspapers, although some chose not to report the exact wording of the joke. Get your facts straight. And McCain wasn’t a presidential candidate then, either.

I blame the unrelenting lock that the left wing has on all forms of the media, including but not restricted to: Television news, cable news, radio, satellite, newspapers, magazines, movies, TV shows, billboards, smoke signals, candygrams, telephone conversations, handwritten notes stuffed into park benches, Alien messages from Betelgeuse, and the sounds I get in my head when I’m feeling stressed.

What difference does that make? If Obama had said the same thing in the third grade, it would be an issue now? How come the past is always relevant for Dems but never Pubs?

I don’t remember which talking head it was, but before Obama announced his selection, one of the pundits said emphatically that picking Hillary would undermine Obama’s entire campaign, since he’d just spent almost a year trying to convince Democrats she wasn’t right for the job of president.

I haven’t seen the root cause of this whole debate, but I’m assuming Biden was responding to some criticism of Clinton. It’s entirely possible he really does respect her and hold her in very high regard.

AFAICT, and a bit to my surprise, Biden is getting a complete and total free pass (as in, I’ve not heard it mentioned and if I did not remember it from the time it happened, would not know about) on his embarrassingly stupid and embarrassing plagiarism rap.

Because it was a bullshit charge.

Is it your contention he did not lift a Kinnock speech, directly, without attribution?

ETA: Even if you think the extent of his parrotting of Kinnock’s speech was not that big a deal, or that his law school plagiarism controversy doesn’t matter, isn’t it the case that if the media really were holding Dems to a perpetual-scrutiny standard, this would include “bullshit charges” as well as charges you acknowledge as once-legitimate?

He did not lift a speech whole, he quoted Kinnock, a friend of his. Every previous time he had quoted Kinnock in speeches, (which he did often) he attributed it. One time he forgot to.

It IS bullshit.

He didn’t quote Kinnock, he repeated his phrasing, substituting the word “Biden” for “Kinnock.”

He customarily quoted a couple of lines from Kinnock and always gave attribution. The one time he forgot to give the cite, he got accused of “plagiarism.” It was bullshit.

Palin has made Biden a non-entity in the news cycles. There’s only so much time in he day.

And he did it dozens of times with attribution. He forgot one time.

<Inigo Montoya> You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. </IM>

Whoosh, much?

:rolleyes:

Oh man! I am so with the perpetual scrutiny notion for this election.

Do the Dems have a few missteps in their past? Sure.

But the Reps have SO much more juicy stuff to latch on to there!

Excellent suggestion! Here’s hoping someone in the MSM picks up on it!

Biden was just clumsily trying to pay Hillary a compliment, just as he clumsily tried to pay Obama a compliment earlier in the primary season, calling Obama “fresh and clean,” etc., and later felt compelled to apologize. I highly doubt he’ll step aside, or that Obama would even dream of asking him to.

Biden will, however, have to walk the same tightrope as GHWB did in 1984 with Geraldine Ferraro. In debating Palin, Biden can’t come across as sexist or patronizing, or there’ll be hell to pay. Alas, I have real doubts as to whether he can pull it off.

I read his comments about Hillary Clinton as being focussed on her ability to perform the duties of Vice President. They both meet the minimum requirements, and she’d probably do better in the long run.

These are not the same duties as the Vice Presidential candidate, however; for Obama’s purposes, she did not match up to Biden, and that’s why Obama didn’t pick her.

First things first: Get Elected. Then be President/VP.

Biden’s second comment about Clinton being a “better” choice for VP (as opposed to whether she was qualified) seems pretty obviously to me to mean that if Clinton was in the VP slot, we wouldn’t have had the Palin drama. That doesn’t mean that Biden thinks Clinton would have made a better VP, just that she may have been a better pick politically.

However, Biden stepping down and Clinton coming in wouldn’t “fix” the Palin thing at all and only make stuff worse.

In an interesting aside, Bill Clinton today predicted that “…Sen. Obama will win and win pretty handily.”

I find that encouraging coming from a guy who can read a political landscape as well as BC can.

Yes, but he also thought until very late in the game that his missus was a mortal lock and destiny’s candidate.

(Disclosure: I think BHO will likely win).

slight hijack\

Just remember Quayle- the only reason the VP’s are getting this much media is that if Obama HAD picked HRC, that would have been the extreme coup. Nothing these relative nobodies say has any real relevance. I shudder to think what woudl have happened with Quayle as pres even more than I do thinking of Palin- and she scares the shit out of me.

But I think that BHO made a grave error in not selecting HRC- I will still vote for him- and this marks only the second time I have voted Dem for pres - usually Lib or independant- but I think he underrates the racism among white midwesterners.

I grew up in Iowa and had no idea it was racist - there was no one around to comment on… all white folks. I thought the ‘n’ word was the same as thee and thou- old hat, and no longer in parlance.

I moved back when I was 18 and it was nigger this and that, and the only non white people in town was a single mexican woman who had married into a town family…

I am scared that the evil death-zombie and the fun crazy party gun lady are gonna win the election. I want him as my grand-dad who I never see and her as my date to the prom- but I don’t want either in the WH…

/hijack