Democratic Vice President Joe Biden is running for president, and he’s eager to ingratiate himself with every political constituency, flatter every donor and pander to every ethnic group between now and the 2016 nomination.
Biden is best known for his many gaffes and smears. In August 2012, he told African-Americans that GOP policies “are going to put y’all back in chains.” These days, he’s trying eyewash, sycophancy, fawning and even blarney.
“Eleven million undocumented aliens are already Americans, in my view,” he told a group of American employers, whom he assumed would empathize with unknown, low-skill foreigners merely because they share the same ethnicity.
“They just want… a chance to put down roots and help build the next great American century,” Biden assured the employers, at a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce event in Washington D.C. “I really believe that,” he said about the millions of people who broke America’s immigration laws.
“It shocks the conscience that at this very moment in American history, in some states, an employer can fire you just because of who you are or who you love,” he told potential gay donors attending a March 23 dinner by Human Rights Campaign.
“It’s close to barbaric… think about this — no, I really mean this, imagine, imagine 20 years from now, as America looks back, and says, how in the hell could that have ever been allowed?” he said.
That wan’t thick enough, so he tried harder.
“Your actions not only liberated millions, millions in the LGBT community, but here’s the point I don’t think you fully understand, you liberated tens of millions of straight guys and straight women. No, no, you have,” he said to laughter and applause.
“I watched personally that it was Poland’s courage that unleashed the forces that brought down the Berlin Wall” in 1989, Biden told Polish politicians and citizens in a March 18 speech that likely will be heard by some Polish donors and voters in the upper midwest. Eastern Germans, even just plain Americans, might like some of the credit too.
“My mom, who passed away a couple of years ago, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden — used to say — and I mean this sincerely — her notion was, she said, ‘Joey, to be Irish is about family, it’s about faith, but most of all, it’s about courage,’” he said May 14 at a St. Patrick’s Day effort to curry favor with the Irish-American vote.
“Without courage, you cannot love with abandon,” said Biden, with all the subtelty of a shillelagh. “I think that’s one of the defining… passion[s] that built both our nations and continues to run through the bloodstream of all Irish Americans,” he said, perhaps under a mistaken impression that he was at an Italian-American event.
“President [Shimon] Peres, you and Prime Minister [Ariel] Sharon are part of one of the most remarkable founding generations in the history not of this nation, but of any nation,” Biden said Jan. 13 at a memorial ceremony for Sharon, who — like some major American donors — celebrated Hanukkah.
“We have never stepped away [from Israel] We have never diminished our support. We have never failed to make Israel’s case around the world,” said Biden in a speech that was 16 times longer that President Barack Obama’s curt, four-sentence send-off.
“Hey, folks, look, there’s a reason the President and I like talking to mayors,” he said to a meeting of mayors on Jan. 23. “You’re the one group of elected officials that get things done… Most of the innovation is coming from you all,” said Biden, who once described Obama’s one-size-fits-all and now unpopular Obamacare network as a “big fucking deal.”
“On every major issue the American people agree with the Democratic party,” Biden told the House Democratic Caucus Retreat, Feb. 14. “They are with us,” he insisted, even though Gallup reported the president’s approval rating was at 42 percent that week.