Loyalty anyone? Not being afraid of smart people? This is one of the strongest things to recommend Biden.
…Biden has surrounded himself with good people throughout nearly half a century in Washington — and he engenders so much loyalty that many in his inner circle have been with him for decades. (Campaign Manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon is one of the few newcomers.) Criticisms that Biden is a hostage of the far left are laughable given how sane and centrist his top advisers are. They include his former chiefs of staff Ron Klain, Bruce Reed, Steve Ricchetti and Ted Kaufman. Combined, these four men have roughly 150 years of Washington experience. All are effective operatives. Not one is a bomb-thrower.
Biden’s foreign policy team includes the likes of Tony Blinken, Avril Haines, Jake Sullivan and Nicholas Burns. All are veterans of high-level government service: Blinken was deputy secretary of state and deputy national security adviser, Haines was deputy national security adviser and deputy CIA director, Sullivan director of policy planning at the State Department, and Burns an undersecretary of state. This is the A Team. They are seasoned professionals, ready to govern on Day One.
We know what they can do because Biden and his aides already have plenty of experience cleaning up after a Republican president. They oversaw the passage and implementation of the 2009 Recovery Act, which is now lauded as “an effective and remarkably fraud-free response to the financial crisis.”
During their many years of service, Biden and his aides have been commendably scandal-free. (A sexual assault accusation against Biden has fallen apart.) The worst that can be said about the Democratic nominee is that he was caught plagiarizing a British politician more than 30 years ago and that he has sometimes been too physically affectionate with supporters. Trump and his aides commit far more serious transgressions on a daily basis. Lacking real scandals to exploit, Trump has sought to concoct, with Russian help, phony allegations of influence-peddling involving Biden’s son Hunter.
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