Monday Open Thread [8.19.13]
“Political allies of Vice President Joe Biden have concluded that he can win the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination–even if Hillary Clinton enters the contest–and are considering steps he could take to prepare for a potential candidacy,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Looks like Papa Joe is tapping into some of Jack Markell’s medical marijuana. Because if he seriously believes he can defeat Hillary, he’s high right now. Mr. Vice President, I love ya, but you are no Barack Obama. Only Obama could defeat Hillary, and even then it was a nailbitter, a down to the wire contest. You have no chance at all.
I agree with David Axelrod, who is quoted in the Journal story, that Biden and Hillary will not run against each other. But Biden will run for President if Hillary doesn’t. He is the Plan B. And because he is the Plan B, he has to begin putting together an organization, and donating money through a PAC to candidates in 2014 to party build and create goodwill.
So Joe Biden and his staff have to talk like he is really running and that they are confident he will beat Hillary to keep up appearances.
The truth is, its all a con-game. The minute Hillary annnounces (January-March 2015), the Vice President will cite his long friendship with the former Secretary of State and beg off.
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Paul Krugman shows you the affect of Fox News and the lies of all Republicans everywhere:
I wondered on my blog what a similar survey would show today, with the deficit falling even faster than it did in the 1990s. Ask and ye shall receive: Hal Varian, the chief economist of Google, offered to run a Google Consumer Survey — a service the company normally sells to market researchers — on the question. So we asked whether the deficit has gone up or down since January 2010. And the results were even worse than in 1996: A majority of those who replied said the deficit has gone up, with more than 40 percent saying that it has gone up a lot. Only 12 percent answered correctly that it has gone down a lot.
Am I saying that voters are stupid? Not at all. People have lives, jobs, children to raise. They’re not going to sit down with Congressional Budget Office reports. Instead, they rely on what they hear from authority figures. The problem is that much of what they hear is misleading if not outright false.
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More Krugman goodness:
[R]epublicans did somewhat successfully blackmail President Obama back in 2011.
However, that was then. They faced a president on the ropes after a stinging defeat in the midterm election, not a president triumphantly re-elected. Furthermore, even in 2011 Mr. Obama wouldn’t give ground on the essentials of health care reform, the signature achievement of his presidency. There’s no way he would undermine the reform at this late date.
Republican leaders seem to get this, even if the base doesn’t. What they don’t seem to get, however, is the integral nature of the reform. So let me help out by explaining, one more time, why Obamacare looks the way it does. [Krugman goes onto to explain the basic structure of healthcare reform: that is, to get private insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions and not impose lifetime or illness caps without premiums going into orbit around Pluto, you have to increase the number of people buying insurance, and you do that through the individual mandate, and then you offer subsidies to those who cannot afford the premiums so that they too buy insurance. That is Obamacare in basic terms.]
I guess that after all the years of vilification it was predictable that Republican leaders would still fail to understand the principles behind health reform and that this would hamper their ability to craft an effective political response as the reform’s implementation draws near. But their rudest shock is yet to come. You see, this thing isn’t going to be the often-predicted “train wreck.” On the contrary, it’s going to work.
Oh, there will be problems, especially in states where Republican governors and legislators are doing all they can to sabotage the implementation. But the basic thrust of Obamacare is, as I’ve just explained, coherent and even fairly simple. Moreover, all the early indications are that the law will, in fact, give millions of Americans who currently lack access to health insurance the coverage they need, while giving millions more a big break in their health care costs. And because so many people will see clear benefits, health reform will prove irreversible.
That is why Republicans are freaking out. They know it will work. They know it will be popular once it works. Thus we have to defund or repeal now and we must shut down the government or create a debt default to do it. If Republicans were so confidant that the law would not work, they would simply sit back and eat popcorn.
There is a path for Joe to beat Hillary. It is the “been there, done that ” path that Obama exploited very well. That path still exists, but it is somewhat faded.
If the country is made to remember the things that they don’t like about Hillary (and Bill) they may look for an alternative. Add to that, the prejudice against recycling the same few political families (Bush didn’t really help that alleviate that) and you could see a fault line that can be leveraged.
This is not to say that Hillary couldn’t overcome that, or that Joe could pull it off, but it is there. Hillary was a forgone conclusion 7 years ago, too.
She’s going to have to announce a hell of a lot sooner than spring 2015. The second tier is not going to wait another year and a half, and the longer she waits the more fed-up and bored the grassroots are going to be.
But the sooner she announces, the more time she has to spend articulating what she would do differently from Obama (or defending why she wouldn’t( – not a good way to define yourself, and not good for her, for Obama, or for the party. On the other hand, campaigning on a continuation of Obama policies isn’t going to cut it either. I’m sure she isn’t eager to get on that tightrope.
A good solid jobs boom in time would close the deal. It’s about damn time anyway.
If the country is made to remember the things that they don’t like about Hillary (and Bill) they may look for an alternative.
I was one of those people. And what I know now is that the sturm and drang that I thought the Clintons would bring back, came back anyway. Because delegitimizing a Democratic President is the GOP playbook. Whether you had the baggage or not, the GOP will spin it up for you and since we have to live with the he say he say media, the spun up BS becomes a legit part of the “debate”.
The other thing about a Hillary vs Biden competition that is on Hillary’s side is history. I wouldn’t discount the feeling that it is well past time to have a female President of the United States.
Don’t forget black men had the right to vote over 50 years before any women could vote. Her election would be just as historic as Obama’s.
The Deputy Treasurer caught making personal charges on her credit card and slow-walking the repayment has resigned. I still want to know how it is that her boss can be utterly unaware of this for the more than a year that the Finance Department was flagging it. I’ve never worked anywhere where a direct supervisor was utterly out of the expense approval loop. Is the State that different?
I understand that, because she came from a Merit System position, she can return to that position with impunity.
I’m pretty sure that she previously worked for the Controller General’s office.
While her ultimate only punishment will be (I assume) that she won’t keep her inflated salary from the Treasurer’s office, she otherwise won’t face any further sanctions. Not too bad for someone who ripped off the state.
Are you ready for some football!!!
Apparently, not everyone….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=C8HCZd2HFfw
I like Joe but he can’t beat Hillary and if he did we would get a Repuk in the white house for he would lose the general election
One of the best tech law bloggers is shutting down because of the PRISM program and it’s effect on some encrypted email providers.
Deserving of its own thread since the Chip folks like to start yelling and it drives up the comments, but did you notice in the paper that, just after beating his chest in the morning to condemn his Deputy and accepting her resignation, Chip was attacking OMB for not moving quickly enough to find her a new state job?
I would welcome Joe’s candidacy to the left of Hillary, if for no other reason than getting her to dampen her hawkish ways. She’d be a better general election candidate with her likely primary win.
Obama got support because the left thought Hillary was more hawkish. Turns out he was much more hawkish than she.
Joe Biden is not to the left of Hillary AT ALL.
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