There’s nothing like having a talented, experienced, significant member of your team who has your back when you’re under fire. That’s a great feeling of support and a powerful show of strength, one that you can use to your advantage to prevail against adversity. Too bad for Barack Obama that he isn’t getting that from Vice President-Elect Joe Biden.
Biden, in a frankly unsurprising and presaged show of his contrarian and arrogant personality, showed up to be sworn in as a United States Senator for his seventh term and began to use his fiffteen days in Congress to start building up legislative support for his President’s honeymoon legislative proposals.*
Which, as it turns out, consists of calling Obama’s choice of Leon Panetta to head the CIA “a mistake,” declared September’s financial markets collapse the equivalent of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and declared the nation “at war” as a result, and revealing that he’s about to take a state trip to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (this information was still under wraps for security reasons). Wow. Talk about being on board with the big guy’s plans. Obama had to know that he’d wind up butting heads with his former colleagues in Congress at some point. He just didn’t expect one of the first salvos to come from his running mate.
Well, he does have a much higher IQ than you, so you really ought to listen carefully to what this very smart man has to say. After all, he understands the grave threat that high fructose corn syrup represents to the average American.
Some people who follow politics worry that there’s not enough news to follow at a point like this. You’ve gotta write about something and for the most part, Cabinet picks are not that interesting subjects. But Joe Biden is the new administration’s gift to them.
* The Constitution provides that the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, which this year fell on a Saturday, so the new Congress took office on the next business day, which was Monday the 5th. But the Constitution also provides that the new President is sworn in on January 20. So there’s a little bit more than two weeks’ time between the new Congress convening and the new President taking office. In addition to winning election as Vice President, Biden also won his bid for re-election as Delaware’s senior Senator because a Delaware law allows a candidate to run for a national office simultaneous to running for statewide office. So, Biden was re-elected Senator and elected Vice President; he gets to be Delaware’s Senator until he takes his oath of office as the Vice President.
