Joe Biden in New Hampshire was up to his old tricks again — and old ones are the only kind of tricks he has.
Biden attacked former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg for being inexperienced, just as he had attacked Barack Obama in 2008 as inexperienced, and Paul Ryan in 2012 as being inexperienced.
Biden has more experience running on his experience than anyone in American history.
A reporter in New Hampshire reminded Biden that he had made the same criticism of Obama, who was just two years out of the state Senate when he started running for president.
“Oh, come on, man!” Biden blurted out. “This guy’s not a Barack Obama!”
This was exactly the one-two punch Biden had been setting up. It was, appropriately enough, ripped off from a very old line by Lloyd Bentsen, who told Dan Quayle, “You’re no Jack Kennedy.” It was also the same trick Biden played on Ryan in 2012.
In the vice-presidential debate that year, Ryan argued for cutting taxes by 20% and still preserving “middle-class” tax breaks. Biden interrupted to assert it was “not mathematically possible” and “it has never been done before.” Ryan pointed out that Ronald Reagan and Kennedy cut taxes and increased growth, and so Biden shot back, “Oh, now you’re Jack Kennedy!?”
The immaturity and dishonesty of Biden’s “Jack Kennedy” play were typical of his behavior in that debate. Interrupting, lobbing irrelevant comebacks, and laughing at accurate, sober points were all part of Biden’s deliberate strategy for the debate: Be an overbearingly smug boor in an effort to make Ryan look weak or small.
Most people couldn’t have pulled it off. Biden did, because such boorishness is his style.
When I was a 22-year-old reporter on Capitol Hill, Biden was reliably obnoxious to me, blowing off my questions with sarcasm and personal jabs. For instance, when I asked him about illegal immigration, he implied that my parents were illegal immigrants and asserted that I advocated hanging everyone who enters the country illegally.
Biden ran the Judiciary Committee that Borked Bork, one of the key moments in making Washington politics as poisonous, cantankerous, and dishonest as it is now.
One former aide, Jeff Connaughton, wrote a book about Biden treating aides poorly. In New Hampshire this past weekend, he called one woman a “lying dog-faced pony-soldier.”
So when we see that Biden, in his third or fourth attempt at running for president, has yet to finish even third place in a primary, and when we see that he failed to build a network of supporters in Iowa, we need to consider that Biden doesn’t win because people don’t like him.
