Joe Biden and Hunter Biden Like it or not, former vice-president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden have been very prominent in the news due to Dump’s seeming obsession to find (or maybe create) information which could implicate them in corruption. Dump thinks that it would be great for his 2020 election chances if he could smear the democrats for hosting a corrupt candidate. Joe Biden has been continually presented as the candidate with the best chance of defeating Dump. In recent months however it seems that Biden’s age and his relatively poor performance in debates is casting some doubts on his suitability as a first choice to defeat Dump. It has never been clear to me why the US voters think Joe Biden would be such a good candidate. He is not just seriously showing his age but his political history provides very little reason to see him as a potential winner! Ironically he is likely to be such a weak candidate that Dump should be welcoming him rather than attacking him. Getting rid of Joe Biden early on in the race may help the Dems to find a better candidate who will be far more successful. By all accounts the Dems need a moderate to defeat Dump. Buttegieg is a moderate with youth on his side, who would probably make an excellent president. Elizabeth Warren is currently painted as too left wing. Whether that would really turn out to be as prejudicial as the media tend to suggest, remains to be seen. She is a certainly a great candidate and she can attract the women’s vote. But however that may be, after an initial surge her popularity now seems to have peaked – for the time being. Bernie Sanders is also pictured as a leader from the left. He also has his age – and a recent heart attack – to contend with but he does have charisma and his popularity is rising. At the year’s end his campaign was raising more funds than any of the other Democratic candidates. Yang is the ‘nigger in the woodpile’ – if you will pardon my expression – and Bloomberg is a dark horse. He has a lot of private money which he is prepared to spend on his campaign and a lot of 1 | P a g e experience. He also appeals to many of the old guard republicans who have been sidelined by the neo- fascists in their successful grab for power in the GOP during recent years. It is an interesting aside. The expression with the ‘n’ word I just used to describe Yang’s candidacy is an American expression which originated in the 1860 election campaign. The candidate for the Republican party was Abraham Lincoln. Apparently support for the abolitionist movement was then still considered to be controversial. In today’s world that would comparable to Democrats downplaying their opposition to the NRA. Actually, as it turned out, after the election in 1860, abolition of slavery was proclaimed by President Lincoln in 1863 and finally confirmed by the 13th constitutional amendment which was passed by congress and approved by the states in 1865. Today of course the GOP is a different party. I doubt if slavery would ever have been abolished with today’s GOP at the helm. Dump has been ambivalent about – if not supportive of - white supremacists, and still Dump’s base remains rock solid. Of course Dump himself has virtually no party allegiance. The only thing which matters to Dump is Dump. He is hugely narcissistic and is solely interested in holding on to power to serve his own need for grandiosity. The GOP however continue to support him since for them, freeing up big capital seems to be the name of the game. Dump’s support for removing restrictions on the power of big capital is music to the ears of the GOP. If that means that the US constitution and the rule of law suffer collateral damage, then so be it. The party has moved far to the right and it will require a young charismatic leader to challenge Dump effectively. Joe Biden is neither young nor charismatic. He has a difficult task ahead if he is to emerge as an effective candidate capable of defeating Dump in 2020. My guess is that he is not the man to do that! He will continue to slide in the polls and after facing defeats early on in the primaries he is likely to fade ignominiously into the past – where he belongs. He will be a better Grandad than POTUS. In 2008 when 2 | P a g e he was selected by the Obama campaign for veep he was viewed as a safe bet. Even then was considered to be too old to represent any real threat to Obama as president during a second term. Biden’s conservative voting record was paradoxically seen as an advantage for a black candidate. Even though Obama was the hero of the racial minority groups he did at least have a white veep candidate on his ticket who had a history of siding with segregationists on the busing issue and voting for big banks against bankruptcy protection for the little man. That would have been reassuring to many conservative voters – voters who may have worried about how a charismatic black leader with a record of working to help the disadvantaged might upset the apple cart. Another issue favoring Joe Biden’s candidacy for veep was that Biden himself had unsuccessfully run for the presidency in 1998 and 2008. Biden did not look like a winner and it seemed unlikely that he could ever outshine his boss. His previous runs for the presidency also meant that after undergoing the scrutiny of two campaigns there were unlikely to be any skeletons in his cupboard – with Biden, what you see is what you get! At that time the story that Dump today is so anxious to tell about Joe Biden’s son Hunter and about Hunter’s appointment in 2014 to the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma, was still future news. If you check out Joe Biden’s life history he seems basically to have been a great family man, even if his political record shows him leaning to the right. But POTUS…. No! He came from a middle class Catholic family which had fallen on hard times during his childhood. After a major dip his father finally achieved a moderate financial recovery working as a car salesman. Joe had a great relationship with his parents and his siblings. His closeness to his siblings – particularly as far as his brother, James, was concerned – was later used by his political opponents to cast aspersions on Joe’s own integrity. And it must be said; James’ career history does not seem to have been squeaky clean. As a child there was no path laid out for Joe to attend an Ivy league university. Despite this, he did succeed in earning his first degree from Delaware university in history and political science even if it wasn’t a distinguished performance (he graduated 506 out of a class of 688). His subsequent law studies at Syracuse University College seem to have been equally undistinguished. In his own words he found his law studies ‘boring’ and there was also an issue of plagiarism during his first year, which he later attributed to his failure to correctly cite his sources. The plagiarism issue raised its head again and was seen to be at least part of the reason for his decision to withdraw his candidacy for president in 1988. There are still plenty of embarrassing videos online today showing Joe Biden making speeches which are – word for word – directly copied from Robert Kennedy, Joe Kennedy and the leader of the opposition labor party in the UK, Neil Kinnock. Joe has dismissed these criticisms as ‘much ado about nothing’ – but there is a pattern here which is certainly not to his credit! It seems that Joe was probably not a great original thinker. He was at ease with taking over ideas from other people and trading them as his own. Even his book, ‘Promise me, Dad’ seems to have been at least partly written by ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer. Joe thanks Mark effusively in the acknowledgements but stops short of crediting him as ghostwriter. Old guys often seem to get pretty much stuck in a rut! Ultimately Joe received his law degree in 1968, graduating 76th of 85 in his class. The long and short of this history is that he was not an academic high flyer. 3 | P a g e So maybe Joe’s talents lay elsewhere? Despite his dislike of boring law studies he started his career as a law clerk and later started his own law company. That was pretty much de rigueur for somebody aiming for a career in politics. And make no mistake about it, despite his relatively underprivileged background – or maybe precisely because of that – Joe Biden had set his sights early on on being a person who would change the way things were run. Power was important to Joe Biden. He first considered himself a liberal republican but when still in his twenties he became an independent before finally switching to the Democrats. In 1970 he successfully ran on a liberal platform to become a County Council member for the Democrats in New Castle, Delaware. He remained an ambitious person. Just two years later he ran for the Senate, challenging an aging incumbent Republican senator in 1972.