Hillary Clinton's been having a rather rough time of it for months now. Not so much because of her performance as a candidate this year as because of the overhang of a few old decisions. The most recurring of those being her decision to run all her e-mail as US secretary of state through a private e-mail account and Clinton family server.
While I'm sure she didn't want to turn her correspondence into an unending game of media gotcha, gotcha is exactly what she got through her high-handed attempts to avoid it. The steady drip-drip has all added up to an erosion of her credibility, popularity, and standing in the polls.
Then Senator Joe Biden joined the Democratic presidential primary field in Carson City, Nevada for the first candidate forum of the 2008 campaign as seen in my cinema verite video, which begins with me filming through the windshield of the Jag as it enters the Silver State's tiny capital city. At the 7-minute mark of the video, we get into the state of the Afghan War.
Still, it looks like a standard Clinton-style scandal. Which is to say problematic, occasionally flashy, but intrinsically not that substantive.
Like the old Crosby, Still, Nash & Young song says: "We have all been here before."
With Hillary's aura of inevitability dented and diminished and the only challenger in the current field gaining traction a self-described socialist senator from a tiny state next door to New Hampshire, some people -- which is to say, a lot of media folks and enough Democrats to cite anonymously -- are looking around for a potential Democratic savior.
There's a little talk about Jerry Brown, who is pretty busy in his record fourth term as California's governor, and former Vice President Al Gore, who's a little less busy. And there is a lot of talk about Vice President Joe Biden.
Biden took a real look at a 2016 presidential run earlier, but President Barack Obama's de facto backing of Hillary short-circuited that. Now Biden is running as well as and even better than Hillary in some key polling against Republicans. Of course, that is after months of attacks against Hillary and a long period of quietude around Biden.
I like Biden. He's a mensch. He seems like a real person in ways that many if not most politicians do not. He knows a lot and he is quotable.
Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates famously wrote in his memoir -- the one about himself s secretary of defense, not the one about himself as director of the CIA -- that Biden was wrong about "everything."
But that's nonsense. Biden has been right about some very big things.
Like the long-term ineffectiveness of the Iraq War "surge" over which Gates presided.
Like Iraq's tendency, in the absence of Saddam Hussein, to shrug off its artificial post-imperial construct as a country in favor of its Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish elements.
Like Biden's opposition to Obama's big Afghanistan escalation in favor of a much more small-scale anti-Al Qaeda program.
As for Gates, one of my favorite Republicans, he should be careful in talking about others getting it wrong. At CIA, he himself was dead wrong about the Gorbachev reforms in the Soviet Union, which he thought were a masquerade for a build-up of Soviet power. In reality, of course, not only was Gorbachev for real, the Soviet Union was on its last legs. Gates missed all that, despite having gotten his doctorate in Soviet studies.
Take Biden's acumen about the world, then add to that old Senate Foreign Relations chairman polish the grounding of a devoted family man in middle-class values and economic concerns and you get both an appealing picture and a potentially formidable candidate.
Of course, there's another side to all this.
Biden has run twice for president. Unlike, say, Jerry Brown, who has beaten a couple of presidents in Democratic primaries, Biden has never come even remotely close to winning a presidential primary or caucus. In fact, his best showing was one (1) percent in Iowa in 2008, after which he promptly dropped out and endorsed Obama.
Biden also ran for the Democratic presidential nomination 20 years before. Many felt that the Delaware senator had a shot then, especially after frontrunner Gary Hart, who had won 26 state primaries and caucuses in his near-miss bid for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination, was knocked out of the race.
The former Colorado senator had a big lead over the Democratic field and then Vice President George Bush. But he was forced from the race by a sex scandal spoon fed to the media the same week as hearings opened into the Iran/Contra scandal, a scandal which created problems for Bush that Hart was very well-suited to exploit.
With a wide-open field, Biden was himself forced from the race by revelations that he was using, without attribution, speech material borrowed from British Labour leader Neil Kinnock and the late Robert F. Kennedy.
More recently, Biden has had to make a couple of awkward policy adjustments.
First, he had to acknowledge that the US invasion of Iraq was a very bad idea. Like Hillary, Biden voted in the Senate to authorize the invasion should George W. Bush choose to undertake it. Which, since he and Vice President Dick Cheney had wanted to invade since before 9/11 presented a bogus pretext, Bush unsurprisingly did.
Second, he had to, er, clarify his view on Afghanistan.
With Democrats having turned against the Iraq War by 2008, many hung on to their toughness credentials by talking up the "good war" that was going badly. That was the Afghan War, which we launched to disrupt and dismantle Al Qaeda's bases and network of influence there after 9/11 and then continued to, well, that was a lot less clear.
In my video report above on the 2008 presidential campaign's first Democratic candidate forum -- held in February 2007 in Carson City, Nevada -- I engaged Biden about the state of the post-9/11 wars. Rather leadingly, I admit, I noted that the British had just sent more troops to Afghanistan and wondered what the rest of NATO should do.
Biden, revealingly and enthusiastically, said that all NATO members should step up with a lot more troops because the Afghan War was going badly. His friend Jim Jones -- four-star Marine general and former NATO commander who would be Obama's first national security advisor -- had just been to Afghanistan and said it was a real mess. People had to understand that Afghanistan tied to Pakistan where the security of nuclear weapons is very much in question. That Al Qaeda, our reason for hitting Afghanistan, was essentially nowhere to be found in Afghanistan was not a factoid in Biden's rhetorical flow.
What Biden said sounded an awful lot like a very big escalation in Afghanistan, which of course has since proved to be both highly problematic and essentially fruitless.
Fortunately, once in office as vice president, Biden refined his views. He and Jones opposed the big Afghan surge favored by most of the Pentagon brass, rejecting the counter-insurgency/nation-building doctrine then in vogue in favor of a much lighter footprint emphasizing counter-terrorism. Unfortunately, Biden lost that fight inside the Obama administration.
Could Biden save the Democrats from a Hillary collapse? He might. But there would have to be a Hillary collapse.
The old journalistic style, in a more sedate past, was to spend a lot of effort explaining the strength of the frontrunner and favorite. The new media style, in the much more frenetic present, is to spotlight the frontrunner's problems, real and otherwise, and talk up impending doom. Both styles are deeply flawed.
Hillary's e-mail controversy is a real nagging problem. Why not just carry two devices, one for the official address and one for the private address?
It's a curious unforced error. But the smoke signals haven't amounted to a smoking gun.
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