Republican primary voters can certainly enjoy hearing Vice President Joe Biden’s reflections on the election this morning, when he said that Republicans can “absolutely” win the presidency next year.
Biden observed that he and Obama face “not a united Republican Party,” but nonetheless a Republican Party that “absolutely [is] strong enough to beat both of us.” Biden explained Obama’s vulnerability by reference to the economy. “A significant majority of the people believe the country is not moving in the right direction. That is never a good place to be going into a reelection [campaign],” Biden said. “Whether it’s your fault or not your fault, it’s almost sometimes, irrelevant,” the Vice President added.
Biden then laid out Obama’s path to victory by discussing “the choice” voters faced in the upcoming election – but he might have accidentally given his opponents the kind of video that makes campaign ad fodder. “The American people . . . are going to have to choose whether or not the path we have set the country on is the path is the path we should continue to go [on] or if we should go back to liberating the economy in the terms of” – and then Biden stopped talking as David Gregory asked a question. Don’t be surprised if the GOP quotes Biden in making the case that this election offers a choice between Obama’s policies – his Environmental Protection Agency regulations, for instance – and “liberating the economy,” as Biden phrased it.
