Those of us silly enough to get excited about this stuff suffered a major letdown this weekend when Joe Biden’s campaign announced that Biden would not announce his vice presidential running mate on Saturday, but would instead wait another week or longer.
Originally set for August 1, the announcement now won’t come before August 10, according to the New York Post.
Biden’s pick is going to be a woman unless Biden breaks his vow from last March, and she’s probably going a “woman of color.”
Given the realities of the American political landscape, that’s a short list of potential running mates. Biden had apparently narrowed even that down to just four two weeks ago when he told MSNBC’s Joy Reid, “I am not committed to naming any (of the potential candidates), but the people I’ve named, and among them there are four Black women.”
Presidential candidates usually announce their running mates very close to the start of the convention which this year doesn’t begin until August 17.
Why Biden chose to announce that he’d announce early and then announced that his early announcement would be delayed, is unknown.
This will-he/won’t-he routine is symptomatic of a campaign — and a candidate — that has no idea what it stands for.
Perhaps most telling is Biden’s Triple Lindy (it’s way more than a mere backflip) on his support for police.
Biden was the author of the Senate version of the 1994 crime bill, but he was happy to share credit with National Association of Police Officers president Joe Scotto, whose team he credited as the bill’s real author. “You guys sat at that conference table of mine for a six-month period, and you wrote the bill,” Biden said later.
Today Biden says that questions about 1994 crime bill are “legitimate” and has jumped on board the #DefundThePolice bandwagon in everything but name.
.@JHoganGidley on Joe Biden defunding police:
“If you don’t think redirect is the same thing as defund, then let me redirect your next paycheck into my bank account.” 🤣🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/vWahyFwWP5
— Jenna Ellis (@JennaEllisEsq) August 1, 2020
Biden’s reversal is so complete that his onetime crime bill coauthors, the National Association of Police Organizations, last month endorsed President Donald Trump for reelection.
And yet, just as recently as 2016 while he was still Veep, Biden was saying he was “not at all” ashamed of the ’94 law he crafted.
Last year during the heat of the primary campaign season, Biden did a double-reverse on the Hyde Amendment that bans federal funding for abortions. Long considered the one thing on which a majority of pro-choice and pro-life politicians could agree on, Biden’s “moderate” campaign abandoned Hyde in pursuit of his party’s increasingly radicalized base.
During an Atlanta campaign stop he said, “If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s ZIP code.”
This happened just one day after Biden’s people told The Hill that “Biden has never changed his support for Hyde Amendment,” according to the report.
Joe Biden: Unfit to Serve by Any and Every Measure
The clarification was necessary because the month before, Biden had told an American Civil Liberties Union volunteer that Hyde “can’t stay.”
Here’s the video the ACLU released on May 8 of 2019 celebrating Biden’s decision to drop Hyde.
Our volunteer Nina asked Joe Biden whether, as president, he would lift the Hyde amendment, which bans federal insurance coverage of abortion.
He said yes. #RightsForAll pic.twitter.com/W4jT7RLNzN
— ACLU (@ACLU) May 8, 2019
Biden dropped his support for Hyde a month before reaffirming his support for Hyde the day before dropping his support for Hyde yet again.
Did you get all that? There will be a quiz at the end of the column.
Biden has also flip-flop-flipped on Communist China.
Last year Biden told an Iowa audience, “We are in a competition with China. We need to get tough with China. They are a serious challenge to us, and in some areas a real threat,” after having spent year playing footsie with the increasingly totalitarian regime. Biden was close enough to Beijing to fly his son Hunter there on Air Force Two in Joe’s official capacity as Vice President.
The trip was a profitable one:
In December 2013, Hunter landed in Beijing aboard Air Force Two, accompanying his father on an official visit to China. Less than two weeks later, Hunter’s company, Rosemont Seneca, became a partner in a new investment company backed by the state-owned Bank of China.
Christening the new firm Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), the partners set out to raise $1 billion for the new fund.
Representatives of the Biden family have denied any connection between the vice president’s visit and Hunter’s business. However, a BHR representative told The New Yorker earlier this year that Hunter used the opportunity to introduce his father to Chinese private equity executive Jonathan Li, who became CEO of BHR after the deal’s conclusion.
Maybe that’s why Biden called Trump a racist in March for stating that the Wuhan virus comes from Wuhan, China.
Why Biden chose to support Trump’s travel ban on China barely a week after denouncing Trump for his travel ban on China remains a mystery, perhaps even to Joe himself.
Biden very broadly hinted last year that he thought the so-called Green New Deal favored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and other party radicals was “insane,” while claiming that his own, much more modest environmental plan was the “legitimate, big-boy climate change plan.”
And yet just last month Biden “endorsed the Green New Deal in all but name.”
That particular flipflop was probably inevitable after last May, when AOC joined one of the joint policy committees Biden put together along with onetime rival, Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders.
It’s no wonder Biden can’t stick to his self-imposed deadline on announcing his veep pick. He barely knows from one day to the next where he stands on vital issues, much less who that nice lady he was just talking to about joining his campaign.
If Biden seems confused, maybe it isn’t dementia — or at least not only dementia. Poor Joe is just getting pulled in too many directions at once by the various factions in his party because the only thing he really seems to stand for his getting Joe Biden elected.
