Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) predicted today that Hillary Clinton would be able to fight off challenges ranging from Republicans to Joe Biden because “she’s talented, she’s mature, she’s a grown-up, she’s a unifier and she’s fought for people.”
Boxer told MSNBC that the vice president can do “of course whatever he wants just as everybody has that chance to run,” but “I just feel because I know the field so well that I don’t see the space, I don’t see the rationale and arguing that you sat in meetings with the president more than the other person, I don’t think that’s what this election is really about.”
“What it’s about is who is going to fight, who’s going to fight hard and I know Joe will make that case eventually if he gets in but I think Hillary Clinton frankly and Bernie Sanders have made that the focal point. And she’s really moved out in the polls now that we see the witch hunt that the Republicans have launched against her, even some of my Republican friends and certainly independent voters are beginning to look at this and say this is horrible, we’re with Hillary, there’s no there there,” Boxer insisted.
Biden today took a bit of a shot at Hillary, taking issue with her debate response that she was proud to have Republicans as her greatest enemy.
“Whenever there’s a problem I get sent to the Hill, which by the way, is a useful use of my time, because I really respect the members up there and I still have a lot of Republican friends,” Biden said. “I don’t think my chief enemy is the Republican Party. You know, this is a matter of, you know, making things work.”
Boxer said Biden was taking Clinton out of context and that “she did it in the sense of a joke, frankly.”
“If you look back at the tape, that was kind of a joke given all the things we found out from Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the Republicans in the House, who said look at her poll numbers, we drove them down because of Benghazi, and that was echoed by another Republican House member and a whistleblower,” the senator said. “…Look, I served with Hillary for years while she was in the United States Senate and I can honestly tell you, she was really respected by the Republicans, she really worked with them very closely.”
But Boxer stressed that she doesn’t think the Democratic Party should tell Biden to run or not run, because “lots of people came up to me and said don’t run and I ran anyway.”
“If I had followed their advice, I wouldn’t have been there. It’s up to him. But the reason I’m commenting on it is the press is asking me and I always speak from the heart,” she said.
“I think that as we have seen, Hillary out there getting attacked, in the beginning I predicted she would be attacked 24/7. She has been attacked 25/7. She withstood it. As she said in the debate, ‘I’m still here.’ We are approaching the time that we will be celebrating 100 years that women got the right to vote, 20/20, imagine having a woman in the White House.”
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