Joe Biden Makes It Official

Tomorrow, Joe Biden makes it official that he's running for president. His critics will argue that his role in the Senate is purely political but that would be a mistake. A presidential candidate has to know what he or she is talking about and when it comes to foreign policy, Senator Biden is a heavyweight with broad knowledge and experience. Every time there is a debate with either Democrats or Republicans, Biden is going to make his fellow debaters squirm if they aren't prepared to discuss foreign policy. John McCain, for example, is no longer quite up to speed on what's happening in the world and it shows; Bush may have been able to bamboozle people in 2000 on foreign policy but Americans are now paying close attention. The senator from Delaware will be a force to reckon with.

Here's the AP story from CBS on Joe Biden's candidacy:

Democratic Sen. Joe Biden has been saying for months he's running for president. He makes it official on Wednesday. The Delaware senator will file the paperwork with the Federal Election Commission and release a videotaped campaign message to voters on his Web site, joebiden.com. He also is planning another trip to New Hampshire early next week.

"After nine months of doing this, there is no exploratory committee _ I'm running," Biden told The Associated Press.

(snip)

"The average voter out there understands that the next president is going to have to be prepared to immediately step in without hesitation and end our involvement in Iraq," Biden said. "It's very difficult to figure out how to move on to broader foreign policy concerns without fixing Iraq first."

If anyone has questions for Senator Biden, Steve Clemons of the blog, The Washington Note, notes that the senator will be take questions on Thursday; here are the details:

Biden is a powerful ideas guy and gets points from me for being brazen, smart, and ready to dump political correctness. Biden is often intellectually ahead of his colleagues and can be flamboyant (well, I can be too). But lately, he's really been pulling the pieces together carefully and in a team manner on how to challenge the President's approach to the Iraq War and broader Middle East challenges.

He has asked the public to email him questions which he hopes to respond to on Thursday. I bet that he and his staff do their darndest given that they need to reach a lot of folks out there fast.

The email address for your questions is: ASKJOE@JOEBIDEN.COM

Personally, I wish Joe Biden were a bit more liberal, and I probably will support one of the other candidates, but, if it comes to it, given what we're facing from the other side of the aisle, I would gladly work hard for Biden if he wins the nomination. No matter what happens, I very much hope Biden stays in the race long enough for at least a half dozen debates. And I would like to see him debate the Republicans a few times so Americans can see that a party of waffling rubber stampers incapable of seeing through Bush's incompetence for five years don't have much to offer these days.

One last point. Biden erred when he voted for authorizing military force in Iraq but he repeatedly spoke out on what needed to happen if Bush were going to follow through on arms inspections, the necessary UN resolutions, multilateral help, and making a proper case for war; and Biden repeatedly pointed out a number of things that the Bush Administration either did not do or that it was doing wrong before a single American soldier crossed into Iraq. In this era where it's convenient to smear candidates, I would argue that Biden's critics on both the right and left should be wary of painting Biden with broad brush strokes.

Update: While I was writing the above post, I saw the remark Joe Biden made about Barack Obama (here's one of dozens of stories on the remark); I winced, decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and moved on. If he continues to make such remarks, of course, his run for the presidency isn't going to last long. But bloggers and journalists everywhere need to be careful in this era of the media and internet microscope. When Hillary Clinton's inabililty to sing well becomes a story, we're becoming a little strange and I fear we may be losing the bigger story, such as bringing the war in Iraq to a close and preventing a third world war. I have a theory that none of the candidates, Republican or Democrat, can survive a truly close scrutiny of their lives and a dissection of every statement or decision they've made and the consequence is that serious and able people could wind up being disqualified whether they're Dennis Kucinich at one end or Joe Biden at the other or anyone in between; we'll end up with more media illusions like George W. Bush, who quite literally could afford to buy a usable image. The failure to simply ask for a clarification can have consquences.