Subject: Re: Are You Ready for President Biden? - The Daily Beast
From: "Alexander S. Mackler" <[email-masked]>
To: "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>, "Joshua Alcorn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 May 2015 07:15:28 -0400

Count me in for the Alaska office, but only if Colorado is already spoken
for.

On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 7:07 AM, Eric Schwerin <[email-masked]
> wrote:

>
>
> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/19/are-you-ready-for-president-biden.html
>
> ARE YOU READY FOR PRESIDENT BIDEN?
>
> If these were ordinary times, a happy warrior like Joe Biden would be
> first out of the starting gate in the race for president. It would be so
> easy; politicking is what he loves to do.
>
> But with Hillary Clinton so dominant in the polls, Biden is hanging back,
> watching and waiting to see if maybe there’s an opening. He’s telling
> supporters in the early states that he’ll decide in the next four weeks, or
> by end of summer.
>
> On that thin thread, Draft Biden 2016, a SuperPAC designed to draft him
> into the race, is lining up endorsements in Iowa, the first contest, and
> organizing house parties and meet ups across the country, from Maryland to
> Alaska.
>
> “Our goal is to have one party in each state, including Alaska,” says
> executive director Will Pierce.
>
> “I just like to say that. I’ve been doing national campaigns for years,
> and I never heard anybody say that. Support for the vice president is
> strong, even in the last frontier!”
>
> Pierce did advance work for Obama in ’08 and ’12, but he’s a novice at
> fundraising, the coin of the realm for ’16. He says Draft Biden has one or
> two major donors, and is on track to hit half a million by the end of the
> quarter when contributions are reported to the FEC.
>
> This is chump change in presidential politics.
>
> What Draft Biden hopes to generate is enthusiasm, and it’s priceless.
> Pierce, 26, and his communications director, Ahmed Khan, are millennials,
> and the “I’m Ridin With Biden” bumper stickers you can get for five bucks
> are pretty cool.
>
> The vice president is wearing his trademark aviator sunglasses and driving
> a Corvette, the image rendered in psychedelic colors like the iconic “Hope”
> poster in ’08 of Barack Obama.
>
> “I have nothing but respect for her (Hillary Clinton), but eight years
> ago, she was inevitable, and look what happened. It’s like the play offs,
> you want to make sure your candidate is ready,” says Pierce. Watching the
> parade of GOP hopefuls at the Faith and Freedom Summit in Iowa earlier this
> month, a Draft Biden supporter said jokingly that he wanted the podium
> rental business when the Republicans were in town.
>
> “Our goal is to have one party in each state, including Alaska,” says
> executive director Will Pierce.
>
> The commercial interests and the enthusiasm that is generated by a
> competitive campaign is what a lot of politics is about especially in the
> early contests. Iowa State Senator Tony Bisignano says he would rather
> Biden decide to run and not bother with the draft, that Iowa needs him to
> get people interested and young people excited. Bisignano has supported
> Biden since his first run for the presidency in 1988, and again in 2008
> “I’ve taken him everywhere from the state fair to church. Everyone loves
> Joe.”  A recent Quinnipiac poll of Iowa Democratic caucus goers puts
> Biden’s favorability rating at 79 percent. Even with the secret service,
> Bisignano notes that Biden is able to “bust loose.”
>
> “We’re not having a contest, we’re having a coronation,” Bisignano says,
> and that’s a hardship for Iowa Democrats. With a Republican governor, two
> Republican senators, and a Republican House, the only body the Democrats
> control is the Iowa senate, and that’s by the closest of margins (26 –
> 24).  To build excitement, they need competition. “I don’t think Clinton’s
> brief appearances here are going to cut it,” says Bisignano.
>
> Iowa Democrat Jim Lykam agrees, that’s why he agreed to sign a letter
> along with several other Iowa lawmakers urging Biden to run.
>
> Lykam, a long-time Biden supporter, said when the veep is in town Biden
> will have the secret service call ahead that he wants to see Lykam, which
> makes the eight-term Davenport lawmaker feel pretty special. In their last
> conversation about 2016, Biden said, “Jim, you’re going to be one of the
> first to know,” a promise the veep no doubt has made to countless others
> who consider him their friend.
>
> Primary fights can get very bitter and personal, yet what’s most striking
> about the Draft Biden effort is how civil everything seems to be, at least
> so far. If Biden declines to get into the race, Draft Biden ‘16 will
> support Clinton, no question. The doubts that emerge around Clinton for
> these Democrats center on her struggle to relate to voters in the same way
> her husband is able to do, and that Biden does so easily.
>
> “For her, it’s like having to join a fraternity or a sorority, there’s
> pledge week and hell week,” says Dick Harpootlian, former Democratic Party
> chairman in South Carolina, who tells of taking six hours to play golf with
> Biden because the veep felt an obligation to chat up everyone on the
> course.
>
> “He relates to everybody,” says Harpootlian, who is advising Draft Biden
> ‘16.
>
> Once a self-described “vociferous” Clinton supporter -- he went
> door-to-door in New Hampshire with Bill in ’92 -- he chose Obama in early
> ’07 despite his historical ties with the Clintons. “It’s more than
> charisma; it’s more than the ability to emote; it’s the ability to speak to
> 25,000 people and have every one of them feel you’re speaking to them.
> Clinton had it, Bush had it, Obama had it, Reagan had it. Joe Biden has it
> -- he can bring people to tears. She ain’t got it.”
>
> After cornering the market on enthusiasm in the last two elections, these
> Democrats, all men perhaps not coincidentally, worry that the promise of
> electing the first woman president may not be enough to rally an electorate
> groomed by cable television and social media to expect the raw emotion of
> political combat. But it may be enough to deter Biden.
>
>
> Eric D. Schwerin
> [email-masked]
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>

-- 

Alexander Snyder Mackler
(302) 598-867