Tuesday Open Thread [3.18.14]

Glenn Thrush has written a pretty neat profile for Politico Magazine on Vice President Joe Biden.

“The only thing I know is I ain’t changing my brand. I know what I believe. I’m confident in what I know. And I’m gonna say it. And if folks like it, wonderful. If they don’t like it, I understand.”

Vice President Joe Biden and I were riding the Amtrak to Philly on a frigid February day. I had asked about 2016 and whether America was ready, at long last, to elect a guy with such a mouth. There he was, barely cracking double digits in the polls, abandoned by the party big shots, and appearing, beyond all good sense, like he wanted nothing more than another crack at the presidency.

I feel sorry for Joe. For all intents and purposes, a sitting Vice President is the de facto frontrunner for the presidency, especially for the party in power’s primary. That doesn’t stop a contested primary from happening. Vice President George H.W. Bush faced a tough challenge from all sides in the GOP in 1988, from Bob Dole, Pat Robertson, Jack Kemp and Pete du Pont. Vice President Al Gore had Bill Bradley to contend with in 2000, and it was surprisingly competitive early on. But if you are a VP wanting to run after an two term presidency, you are the clear frontrunner.

Not this time. Vice President Joe Biden is an after thought. People laugh when they hear that he wants to run for President, not necessarily because they find Joe Biden humorous, but because everyone knows Hillary is the frontrunner and will wipe the floor with Joe. The situation is unprecedented.

Thrush then focuses on how VPs and their Presidents tend to fall out near the end of a two term presidency. Clinton and Gore barely spoke, and Bush threw Cheney in the trash and turned to less evil advisors in the end.

How does this one end?

When we talk, Biden tells me he’ll respond by embracing “my guy” Obama even harder, but it’s clear he could use his guy to reciprocate: Over the past year, Harry Reid, the ornery Senate majority leader, has elbowed Biden out of the budget process he dominated not so long ago, and the White House seems OK with that. There was even the report last fall, over-torqued but nonetheless embarrassing, that Obama’s team had mused about booting Biden off the 2012 ticket in favor of Hillary Clinton. As if that wasn’t bad enough, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has taken it as his own personal mission to dismantle Biden’s elder statesman status, declaring in his recent memoir that Biden had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

I also get the sense that the White House prefers Obama’s successor be Hillary rather than Biden. I wonder if Biden knows that.