“Mutual Assured Destruction” is a military doctrine in which “a full-scale use of high-yield weapons of mass destruction by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.”
Has the nation in recent months been witnessing the high-stakes political equivalent of the MAD doctrine?
Up until around noon last Wednesday, the conventional wisdom was that Vice President Joe Biden was going to jump into the 2016 race. Washington insiders were telling reporters that it was a sure thing. Biden was gearing up and already launching attacks against Clinton. All of the signals pointed to Biden running.
But the signals were wrong. Biden announced in a Rose Garden speech (which sounded oddly like a campaign speech) that he would actually not be running for president of the United States.
The vice president said that he felt the window of opportunity to mount a viable campaign had closed. Although he had wanted to enter the 2016 race, he concluded that he just couldn’t win the Democratic nomination at this late date.
That is the official story.
Biden’s decision came on the eve of Hillary Clinton’s appearance before the Select Committee on Benghazi.
The obvious question is: if he was serious about running, why didn’t he jump in the race before it was too late?
Washington Times columnist and Fox News political analyst Monica Crowley has a theory about that. His initial game plan, Crowley says, was to avoid getting “dirtied up” in the early debates and campaign trail and jump in after Clinton’s campaign was taken down by the email scandal.
According to this theory, there is only one person on the Democrat side who matters, and that person is Barack Obama. He controls the agenda and he wanted Hillary sidelined to make way for his choices — a sycophant who could be trusted to continue his policies for one term, and, as VP, Liz Warren, who would keep the ball rolling for the ensuing eight years.
It wasn’t to be — but why?
“Something bigger and darker going on as is usually the case with Barack Obama,” Crowley said on the John Batchelor Show last week.
“What we have been seeing over the last several months between Mrs. Clinton and the president is a very bloody but unspoken negotiation between the two of them. So the FBI investigation was the president putting Clinton in a political and legal vise and then tightening the vise every so often — when he thought she was getting too haughty, or out of control, or thought that this nomination was hers for the taking, they would ratchet up the pressure, they would start leaking what the investigators were looking at….”
Crowley continued, “Remember, the first story back in March about the private email server came from Valerie Jarrett in the White House. They have been squeezing her.”
Indeed, author Edward Klein wrote in his new book “Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary” that an angry Hillary Clinton confronted Obama at the White House. “What I want for you to do is call off your f–king dogs, Barack!” Clinton allegedly raged at Obama.
The negotiation Crowley speaks of goes both ways because Clinton has cards to play against Obama, too. “Whether that has to do with Benghazi, or the Iranians or the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Russians, I have no idea,” Crowley mused. But if Clinton had insider knowledge destructive to Obama and decided to play that card, “that would explain Mr. Biden’s removal from the race.”
Crowley imagined a conversation between Hillary Clinton and the president where Clinton hypothetically said, “If you don’t back off and pull the plug on Biden, I will go before the Congress and the world on Thursday in this Benghazi hearing and tell them exactly what happened that day. I will tell them where you were….I will say what we said in that 10:00 pm phone call…”
“God knows what else she could have on Obama,” Crowley concluded. “The Biden exit doesn’t make sense on the surface so there has to be something else at play.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member