WASHINGTON: In one of the many disparaging comments about American vice-presidentship, a prospect (Daniel Webster) who was approached to take up the post is said to have riposted, ”I do not intend to be buried until I’m dead.” Thomas Marshall, the 28th US Vice President, lamented: ”Once there were two brothers. One went away to sea; the other was elected vice president. And nothing was heard of either of them again.”
Joe Biden intends to challenge that image. The two-term vice-president under announced his decision to run for the on Thursday, entering a crowded field of nearly 20 aspirants who will duke it out for the Democratic nomination before taking on incumbent , the likely Republican nominee, in the 2020 Presidential race.
“We are in the battle for the soul of this nation,” Biden declared in his announcement video he posted on Twitter, explaining his rationale for entering an already crowded Democratic field. “The core values are standing in the world. Everything that has made is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.”
Vice-presidents have seldom been a shoo-in for the Presidency in the US. To date only 14 veeps have gone on to become presidents. Of them, four assumed the presidency after the president died of natural causes; four assumed the presidency after the president was assassinated, including Andrew Johnson after Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy. Gerald Ford succeeded Nixon after the latter’s resignation.
Only 5 veeps have been elected to the presidency: Adams, Jefferson, Van Buren, Nixon, and Bush Sr. Another veep, Al Gore, won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College.
Biden enters the race with several advantages. For one, he has immense name recognition not only by virtue of his two terms as V-P during which Obama gave him an active role, but also because he was an important political player even before he became Obama’s deputy. One of the youngest to be elected to the U.S Senate when he was only 31, the 76-year old political veteran was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a key position in which he drove U.S foreign policy, work that Obama too encouraged.
This is also his third shot at the White House, after attempts in 1988 and 2008 (when Obama won the nomination). In 2016, he ceded to Hillary Clinton. By no stretch of imagination does he match up to the lament of , the country’s first vice-president, described the post as ”the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”
On the downside, he has a reputation as a bloviator and is known to be prone to gaffes. In one blooper, he once mimicked a desi accent while boasting of his great relationship with Indians, saying, ”In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.” Indeed, he does have strong support from Delaware desis but the accent and metaphor he chose to claim that was considered unnecessary.
Then there is the more recent flap over his purported touchy-feely approach to women that has earned for him the moniker “Creepy Joe” from conservative trolls. In a needling reference to that epithet, President Trump, not exactly the paragon of virtue, greeted him with a snarky tweet: Welcome to the race Sleepy Joe. I only hope you have the intelligence, long in doubt, to wage a successful primary campaign. It will be nasty – you will be dealing with people who truly have some very sick & demented ideas. But if you make it, I will see you at the Starting Gate!
Indeed, first up, Biden, although a frontrunner straightaway, will have to overcome obstacles within the Democratic Party, where reception to his announcement was mixed. welcomed him with a “more the merrier” message, but cohorts in the left wing of the party were leery of a man they see as part of the old establishment.
“While we’re going to support the Democratic nominee, we can’t let a so-called ‘centrist’ like Joe Biden divide the Democratic Party and turn it into the party of ‘No, we can’t,’” the group Justice Democrats said in a statement, adding that “The old guard of the Democratic Party failed to stop Trump, and they can’t be counted on to lead the fight against his divide-and-conquer politics today.”
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