“The
definition of insanity,” Einstein didn’t say, “is doing
the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”
Have the
Democrats gone mad? Are they really planning on putting up the same
type of candidate against Donald Trump in 2020 that they put up
against him in 2016? Is the party bent on nominating Hillary 2.0?
How else
to describe Joe Biden, the former vice president and ex-senator from
Delaware, who is leading in the polls and has hinted that he’d
reveal whether he’s running for president in “a few weeks”
and might select a running mate early in the process?
Forget,
for a moment, his “blue-collar-uncle-at-the-end-of-the-bar
persona.” Ignore also his recent, and ridiculous, claim to have the
“most progressive record of anybody” running for
president. Consider, instead, the sheer number of similarities he
seems to have with the vanquished Democratic presidential candidate
of 2016.
Iraq War
supporter? Check. Clinton was pilloried by the left and the right
alike as a wild-eyed hawk; her vote in favor of the Iraq invasion
haunted both her 2008 and 2016 campaigns. In fact, a study by two
academics in 2017 found a “significant and meaningful
relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and
its support for Trump” and suggested that if Pennsylvania,
Michigan, and Wisconsin “had suffered even a modestly lower
casualty rate,” they could have “sent Hillary Clinton to
the White House.”
Let’s
be clear: If he runs, Biden will be the only candidate — out of up
to 20 Democrats running for the nomination — to have voted for the
Iraq War. As the influential chair of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee in the run-up to the invasion, Biden (falsely) claimed the
United States had “no choice but to eliminate the threat”
from Saddam Hussein. A former U.N. weapons inspector even accused the
then-senator of running a “sham” committee hearing that
provided “political cover for a massive military attack on
Iraq.”
Friend
of Wall Street? Check. Clinton had a Goldman Sachs problem; Biden has
an MBNA problem. Headquartered in his home state of Delaware, the
credit card giant MBNA was his biggest donor when he served in the
Senate. In 2005, Biden threw his weight behind a bankruptcy bill,
signed into law by President George W. Bush, that shamefully
protected credit card companies at the expense of borrowers.
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