Kevin Williamson of National Review Online muses about the reasons President Obama might want to see a Joe Biden presidency.
As he approaches the end of his career in elected office, Barack Obama is in a truly precarious position: He is going to exit the White House having accomplished almost nothing substantive on the policy front — his health-care program is not going to survive, Gitmo is not going to be closed, we are not leaving Afghanistan, and he is sending troops into Iraq — and outside of his perch at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, his party is in ruins: In Congress and the states, the Democrats are in their weakest position in modern political history. If the Democrats do not win the presidency in 2016, there are going to be some very uncomfortable questions about what exactly Obama & Co. accomplished, and at what price.
What to do? Throw Herself to the wolves, of course. …
… But the Clintons aren’t Obama’s people. Bill Clinton thinks of Obama as his own political Stepin Fetchit, the guy who only a few years ago would have been “carrying our bags.” Herself was Obama’s main obstacle to power. (No, Senator McCain most certainly was not.) Obama did not build this machine to hand it over to the Clintons on a cold winter morning in 2017. …
… And that’s where Joe Biden comes in. Biden is the Obama guy who isn’t really an Obama guy — he was elected to the U.S. Senate when Barack Obama was eleven years old. He had a life and a political career before he hitched his wagon to the teapot messiah from Chicago, and though his is not the keenest mind in politics, he surely gets the game: If he gets in, he is to be reduced to a purely instrumental condition, an enabler of Obama’s last and most important political play, a placeholder keeping the chair warm until Obama’s people have settled on a real president.
