It’s not entirely Joe Biden’s fault that he’ll likely be the Democratic Party’s next loser in a presidential race, but it’s a fate that, like many of us, he may have already accepted.
There’s a pandemic going on that has placed an indefinite hold on normal campaign activity, so the former vice president is at an unusual disadvantage. Still, in an interview Tuesday with Chris Cuomo on CNN, he was particularly rudderless.
Asked about that anticlimactic phone call he had with President Trump this week, he said he had nothing new to offer because he had agreed to keep the details of it confidential. Furthermore, he said that the suggestions he offered to the president had already been made public in his great anti-coronavirus plan of action.
“I called the White House, sure enough, the president wanted to talk,” Biden said. “We had a good conversation. I laid out what I thought he should be doing. I laid out four or five specific points that I thought were necessary, and I indicated that it’s about taking responsibility and being commander in chief, taking on responsibility. He asked me whether or not we would not discuss the detail of what we talked about, just say that we had a good conversation. He was very gracious in his conversation.”
That was that, and that was it.
Biden knows that nobody is thinking about him right now. The most prominent role he’s played in the national conversation was to appear in a New York Times article highlighting liberals wishful that they could replace him as the nominee with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Biden wasn’t dealt the best hand, and he knows it. And he may also know that the coming election is a foregone conclusion.
