Decision ‘08

Biden Declares For President (Again!)

Haven’t we already been through this? How many times does Joe Biden get to declare for president?

Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. Wednesday officially launched his well-expected candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

It’s a bid predicated on one major assumption: that the race will focus greatly on Iraq and other international trouble spots, putting a high priority on candidates’ foreign policy credentials. And foreign policy experience is something that Biden —chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and scathing critic of how President Bush has handled the war in Iraq — can claim without contradiction.

The 64-year-old Biden, despite his 34 years in the Senate and frequent media appearances, lacks the celebrity factor of the Democrats currently topping presidential preference polls of Democratic voters: Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois — whose combined total of just more than eight years of Senate service measures to less than a quarter of Biden’s own tenure.

This is, in fact, Biden’s second venture into presidential politics, though his bid for the 1988 Democratic nomination was troubled-plagued and brief.

This one may be, too: check out the following Biden gaffe, regarding Barack Obama:

COULD this be remembered as the first US presidential campaign to start and end in a single day?

Senator Joseph Biden, who announced his candidacy on Wednesday hoping to ride his foreign policy expertise to the Democratic nomination, instead spent the day struggling to explain his description of fellow candidate Senator Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”.

The remark, published in The New York Observer, left Senator Biden’s campaign floundering.

We should be past the point in our society where it is considered a novelty to be black and intelligent. I’m not the type to see racism around every corner, but it’s hard to think of an alternate explanation for such a comment…