[Mb-civic] Loose Lips Sink . . . - Richard Cohen - Washington Post
Op-Ed
William Swiggard
swiggard at comcast.net
Thu Jan 12 03:55:37 PST 2006
Loose Lips Sink . . .
Biden's Leadership Is Lost in All His Talk
By Richard Cohen
Thursday, January 12, 2006; A21
The only thing standing between Joe Biden and the presidency is his
mouth. That, though, is no small matter. It is a Himalayan barrier, a
Sahara of a handicap, a summer's day in Death Valley, a winter's night
at the pole (either one) -- an endless list of metaphors intended to
show you both the immensity of the problem and to illustrate it with the
op-ed version of excess. This, alas, is Joe Biden.
The reviews for Biden's first crack at Samuel Alito, the humorless
Supreme Court nominee, were murderous. The New York Times had Biden out
on Page One -- normally a position to kill for -- only this time it was
not a paean to his considerable merits, but an account of how it took
him nearly three minutes of throat-clearing to ask his first question
and then took the rest of his allocated 30 minutes just to get in four
more. He concluded with about half a minute still left to him --
something of a personal best that even he had to acknowledge.
"I want to note that for maybe the first time in history, Biden is 40
seconds under his time," he told Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen
Specter, no clipped speaker himself.
The Post had a similar account of Biden running off at the mouth. In
that piece, Dana Milbank wrote that during Biden's round of questioning,
he "spoke about his own Irish American roots, his 'Grandfather
Finnegan,' his son's application to Princeton (he attended the
University of Pennsylvania instead, Biden said), a speech the senator
gave on the Princeton campus, the fact that Biden is 'not a Princeton
fan,' and his views on the eyeglasses of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)."
The tragedy is that Biden, who is running for president, is a much
better man and senator than these accounts would suggest. But his
tendency, his compulsion, his manic-obsessive running of the mouth has
become the functional equivalent of womanizing or some other character
weakness that disqualifies a man for the presidency. It is his version
of corruption, of alcoholism, of a fierce temper or vile views -- all
the sorts of things that have crippled candidates in the past. It is,
though, an innocent thing, as good-humored as the man and of no real
policy consequence. It will merely stunt him politically.
'Tis a pity. Biden occupies the sensible center of the Democratic Party.
He supported Bill Clinton's crime bill (more cops, fewer assault rifles)
which helped the Democrats fight the talk-show calumny that they were
pro-crime and anti-cop. In his maturity, he has emerged, along with some
appropriate gray hair, as one of his party's most important -- and
knowledgeable -- voices on foreign policy. Even on Iraq, an area where
too many Democrats forgot that there was any reason for war, Biden took
a decidedly centrist -- and defensible -- position. He voted to
authorize the president to go to war but has since characterized that
vote as "a mistake."
"It was a mistake to assume the president would use the authority we
gave him properly," Biden said in November on "Meet the Press" -- adding
that if he were allotted a do-over, he'd vote no. Since this
approximately reflects my own position, I am inclined to appreciate its
wisdom. But even before that vote, Biden was urging President Bush to
seek international support for the Iraq effort, not to move
precipitously, and to have a postwar plan. Bush, listening to
you-know-who, did what the voices told him.
The seniority that makes Biden so knowledgeable on foreign policy -- a
conversation with him is always instructive -- is also what cripples. He
has been in the Senate since 1973 and suffers, as nearly all senators do
sooner or later, from the conviction that he and his colleagues are the
center of the world. After all, no one -- with the possible exception of
family members -- ever tells a senator to shut up. They are surrounded
by fawning staff and generally treated as minor deities. They lose
perspective, which is why, now that you've asked, they talk and talk at
these hearings. They are convinced the world is watching. Actually, it's
only a half a dozen shut-ins on C-SPAN -- and, of course, the nearly
catatonic press corps. Everyone else is playing computer solitaire.
Biden ran for president once before -- and then, too, his mouth went off
on its own. (In 1988, his stump speech was perilously similar to the one
used by Neil Kinnock, Britain's Labor Party leader.) This time seems no
different, except the loss is greater. Foreign policy, Biden's
specialty, is the number one issue. He has much to say -- and then too
much to add. He is an anatomical disaster. His Achilles' heel is his mouth.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/11/AR2006011102041.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060112/248c035c/attachment.htm
More information about the Mb-civic
mailing list