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Biden Was............Wrong?

Mike

Well-known member
Did Biden Get It Wrong? You Betcha
Monday, October 06, 2008

By John R. Lott, Jr.


When you interview for a job, here is a hint: make sure you know what the job is. Joe Biden failed that test last Thursday. He couldn’t even get right what a vice president does, but the media didn’t notice.

The media is all over itself about how smart and experienced Biden is. Political analyst Charlie Cook is quoted in the Washington Post on Saturday as saying “Biden is clearly so much more knowledgeable, by a factor of about a million.” Saturday Night Live does a skit about Biden being smart, if slimy. Meanwhile, Governor Sarah Palin is treated as being nothing more than a simpleton.

Yet, take Biden’s statement from the debate on the role of the vice president:

"Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.
And the primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there's a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit.

The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he's part of the Legislative Branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive, and look where it has gotten us. It has been very dangerous."


One should be careful when throwing around terms such as “most dangerous” and “bizarre.” But Biden is confusing which part of the Constitution covers the Executive Branch (it is Article II, not Article I). More importantly, the notion that the vice president can preside over the Senate only when there is a tie vote is simply wrong. Nor is it true that the only legislative involvement the vice president has is to break tie votes. The vice president is the president of the Senate, where he interprets the rules and can only be overridden by a vote of 60 senators.

Early vice presidents spent a lot of time in the Senate. Thomas Jefferson even spent his time writing “A Manual of Parliamentary Practice: for the Use of the Senate of the United States.” Modern vice presidents may show up only when they think tie votes will occur, but that is their choice.

This isn’t rocket science. The Constitution on this point is very straightforward: “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.”

Instead, it was Palin who got it right. Besides correctly stating that the vice president holds positions in both the executive and legislative branches, she also noted that:

Of course, we know what a vice president does. And that's not only to preside over the Senate and will take that position very seriously also. I'm thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president if that vice president so chooses to exert it in working with the Senate and making sure that we are supportive of the president's policies and making sure too that our president understands what our strengths are.



But just as the vice president’s job includes more than simply being ready to assume the presidency if the president dies, the Constitution merely states what the vice president’s minimum responsibilities are.

Compare the uproar over Palin’s answer to Charlie Gibson about the “Bush Doctrine,” a doctrine that Gibson clearly didn’t understand and for which there apparently exist at least four different versions. Where is the outrage over Biden not understanding what vice presidents do? For Biden, his inability to correctly say what vice presidents do was surely his “gotcha” moment.

Yet, this mistake during the debate was hardly unique. Biden got a lot of things wrong in the debate that are going unnoticed by the fact-check media. Take just a few:

-- Will McCain's health care proposals raise taxes? Biden says that McCain’s proposal will cost people money. The Tax Foundation finds that could easily be "roughly deficit-neutral over ten years."

-- Under an Obama Administration the middle class will "pay no more than they did under Ronald Reagan"? No, the tax rates will be similar to the higher rates under Clinton.

-- Did "we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country"? No, one year’s worth of spending in Iraq equaled five in Afghanistan.

-- France and the U.S. "kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon"? No, and it wouldn't have made much more sense if he had said "Syria" instead.

-- Is it really “simply not true” that Obama said that he would meet with the leader of countries such as Iran without preconditions? No, Obama said “I would.”

-- Did Obama warn against letting Hamas participate in Palestinian legislative elections in 2005? No.

-- Do “Iraqis have an $80 billion surplus”? No. If oil prices had remained high, it might have reached $50 billion by the end of this year.

-- Finally, an amusing point as evidence that Biden is just one of the people he pointed to, inviting anyone to have a beer with him at "Katie's Restaurant" in Wilmington, Del. Unfortunately, people will have a hard time taking him up on his offer, since the restaurant hasn't had that name for probably 15 years.

Unfortunately, voters who are trying to get an accurate count on whether the candidates are telling the truth can’t rely on the media. FactCheck.org mentions only one of these points, the size of the Iraqi surplus. The Washington Post mentioned Biden’s misstatement on Hamas and Katie’s restaurant. AOL’s coverage of the errors in the vice presidential debate was by far the worst, though that might not be too surprising given that Tommy Christopher, who wrote their news analysis, also blogs on the Obama Web site. None of these checkers mentioned Biden's statements about the role of the vice president.

Compare this to the attacks on Sarah Palin:

-- FactCheck.org criticizes Palin for claiming that McCain’s health care tax credits will be "budget neutral" – they argue that the tax credit will be larger than the new taxes that the program will impose. Fine, but if the people at FactCheck.org believe that is true and that the Tax Foundation is wrong, Biden’s claim about increased taxes is even more inaccurate. But FactCheck.org doesn't even mention Biden’s statement from the debate.

-- From AOL's news analysis piece. “Palin: Said that it is untrue that the U.S. is killing civilians in Afghanistan. According to an analysis by the AP, however, the U.S. is killing more civilians than insurgents are.”

What Palin actually said was: “Now, Barack Obama had said that all we're doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians.” Whether one believes the AP estimate or not, the question is whether she was accurately characterizing Obama’s statement of the job that our forces were doing. And Obama said, “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians” (emphasis added).

-- FactCheck.org’s first critique claims that Palin was wrong to claim that troop levels in Iraq are down to their pre-surge levels. They are correct that after the recently announced drawdown, 6,000 more troops will be in Iraq than immediately before the surge. But why not mention that 84 percent of the 38,000 troops in the surge are home or are in the process of coming home?

The media seems to have been covering for Biden for some time. While news stories still talk about Dan Quayle’s spelling mistake 18 years later, there has been almost no news coverage of Biden’s numerous wacky statements. What if Quayle had said something similar to Biden’s recent statement that, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'" A neat trick given that Herbert Hoover was president in 1929 and no one was watching television.

It might not fit the simple template for a 36-year veteran of the Senate to not understand what vice presidents do (after all, eight vice presidents have served with him), but Biden knew less about this than the political outsider, Sarah Palin. Given that they are running to be vice president, why didn’t that story dominate the news coverage after the debate?



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


John Lott is the author of Freedomnomics and a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland.
 

fff

Well-known member
Saw old Joe at a campaign stop this morning on TV. He's attractive, smooth, reassuring, happy, positive, speaks well. I think he'll be a fine vice president and, if necessary, can step right into the Oval Office without a hitch. Obama made a good choice. John McCain gave us inexperienced, ethically challenged Sarah Palin. It's pretty obvious who in this race has the better judgment. :D
 

Sandhusker

Well-known member
fff said:
Saw old Joe at a campaign stop this morning on TV. He's attractive, smooth, reassuring, happy, positive, speaks well. I think he'll be a fine vice president and, if necessary, can step right into the Oval Office without a hitch. Obama made a good choice. John McCain gave us inexperienced, ethically challenged Sarah Palin. It's pretty obvious who in this race has the better judgment. :D

The DNC gave us an inexperienced ethically challenged presidential candidate.
 

mytfarms

Well-known member
Now, now. Sarah Palin has been a mother. Being a mother gives quite a bit of experience and you have to overcome many challenges. Biden will never be a mother get the experience from it. As I see it, Palin is by far the more attractive, smooth, and experienced of the two!
 

Sandhusker

Well-known member
don said:
the republicans gave you a stewardess for a vice presidential candidate.

I would say that her having the highest approval rating of any sitting governor shows that you just proved that you don't know enough about her to make a comment.
 

TexasBred

Well-known member
fff said:
Saw old Joe at a campaign stop this morning on TV. He's attractive, smooth, reassuring, happy, positive, speaks well. I think he'll be a fine vice president and, if necessary, can step right into the Oval Office without a hitch. Obama made a good choice. John McCain gave us inexperienced, ethically challenged Sarah Palin. It's pretty obvious who in this race has the better judgment. :D

fff..glad you have it figured out. Biden himself doesn't know what he'll say or do next.
 

fff

Well-known member
Sandhusker said:
don said:
the republicans gave you a stewardess for a vice presidential candidate.

I would say that her having the highest approval rating of any sitting governor shows that you just proved that you don't know enough about her to make a comment.

Don't you ever get tired of being wrong? :D

Since she was picked for the Veep spot, the press has often noted that Sarah Palin has "80%" approval ratings in Alaska. Just yesterday, John McCain told the Des Moines Register editorial board that she is "the most popular governor in the United States." But that may be outdated.

McClatchy reports today that her approval rating in her home state has tumbled to 68% -- still high but surely not the country's best. The poll by a local firm that works for both parties was taken Sept. 20-22. McClatchy writes: "Palin’s popularity has swooned as new information about the local abuse-of-power investigation known as Troopergate has trickled out, and as national and local media pick over her track record as a governor and small-town mayor.

"Palin still has overwhelming support among Alaska Republicans. But many Democrats and independents, who gave her positive marks just a month ago, have changed their views....

"Brad Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc., said an approval rating in the 60s for a governor is good. His recent polling in six western states found two governors with approval ratings in the low-80s, two in the 60s and one in the 50s."

Also, contrary to McCain's statement that Palin is "overwhelmingly popular" with Americans, in a new survey Pew finds that 51% of Americans now believe that Palin is unqualified, up from 37% after her announcement.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003856855

And this was before the "Troopergate report" was issued.
 

fff

Well-known member
Sandhusker said:
On a related note, fff; When do you believe a fetus becomes is baby?

When it can survive outside the womb. Up to that point, IMO, it's part of a woman's body and she has the legal right to whatever she choses with her body. And when you or any other man has your first baby, THEN you can have a voice in the discussion. :mad:
 

Mrs.Greg

Well-known member
fff said:
Sandhusker said:
On a related note, fff; When do you believe a fetus becomes is baby?

When it can survive outside the womb. Up to that point, IMO, it's part of a woman's body and she has the legal right to whatever she choses with her body. And when you or any other man has your first baby, THEN you can have a voice in the discussion. :mad:
I'm a female,vote on that and my feelings on that have been legistated away...pissses me right off.My daughter is three months preg. we don't talk about the fetus we talk about the baby....its growing,breathing,right now its getting its skin....its a human.
 

fff

Well-known member
Mrs.Greg said:
fff said:
Sandhusker said:
On a related note, fff; When do you believe a fetus becomes is baby?

When it can survive outside the womb. Up to that point, IMO, it's part of a woman's body and she has the legal right to whatever she choses with her body. And when you or any other man has your first baby, THEN you can have a voice in the discussion. :mad:
I'm a female,vote on that and my feelings on that have been legistated away...pissses me right off.My daughter is three months preg. we don't talk about the fetus we talk about the baby....its growing,breathing,right now its getting its skin....its a human.

Your daughter made her CHOICE. That's what's important. If she'd been a 12 year old child impregnated by a rapist, would you be so happy for her? Even if you would, others might not want their 12 year olds carrying that pregnancy to term. It's a CHOICE every woman has the right to make for herself.
 

Mrs.Greg

Well-known member
fff said:
Mrs.Greg said:
fff said:
When it can survive outside the womb. Up to that point, IMO, it's part of a woman's body and she has the legal right to whatever she choses with her body. And when you or any other man has your first baby, THEN you can have a voice in the discussion. :mad:
I'm a female,vote on that and my feelings on that have been legistated away...pissses me right off.My daughter is three months preg. we don't talk about the fetus we talk about the baby....its growing,breathing,right now its getting its skin....its a human.

Your daughter made her CHOICE. That's what's important. If she'd been a 12 year old child impregnated by a rapist, would you be so happy for her? Even if you would, others might not want their 12 year olds carrying that pregnancy to term. It's a CHOICE every woman has the right to make for herself.
I would prefer my raped 12 yr old daughter followed through with a pregnancy,gave the baby to a caring home and live with that then live with having had an abortion. Abortion is not an easy choice to live with.
 

Sandhusker

Well-known member
fff said:
Sandhusker said:
On a related note, fff; When do you believe a fetus becomes is baby?

When it can survive outside the womb. Up to that point, IMO, it's part of a woman's body and she has the legal right to whatever she choses with her body. And when you or any other man has your first baby, THEN you can have a voice in the discussion. :mad:

OK, you've established that a being is a baby and no longer a fetus as soon as it is surviving outside of the mother's womb. Is it then acceptable to you to kill that baby?
 

TexasBred

Well-known member
fff said:
Sandhusker said:
On a related note, fff; When do you believe a fetus becomes is baby?

When it can survive outside the womb. Up to that point, IMO, it's part of a woman's body and she has the legal right to whatever she choses with her body. And when you or any other man has your first baby, THEN you can have a voice in the discussion. :mad:

hmmm...a part of her body...like a cancer to be removed?? Why not like a heart that needs to be removed?? Which part of the body would this "mass' be part of. It has it's own brain, blood system, nervous system, emotions, reacts to sound and stimulation. You'll never convince me it's not a baby.
 
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