Subject: Joe Biden media coverage: summer fling - POLITICO
From: "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>
To: "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>, "Alexander Snyder-Mackler" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2015 20:44:32 -0400

Joe Biden media coverage: summer fling - POLITICO

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/joe-biden-media-coverage-120963.html

Joe Biden media coverage: summer fling - POLITICO

Who wants Joe Biden to run for president?

Friends, family, a close circle of advisers and Democratic donors. Oh, and,
seemingly, much of the political press corps.

Story Continued Below

Starved
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/us/politics/hillary-clinton-acutely-aware-of-pitfalls-avoids-press-on-campaign-trail.html?_r=0>
by Hillary Clinton’s rope lines
<http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/roger-simon-hillary-clinton-press-119777.html>
and pro forma remarks
<http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-07-17/the-next-phase-of-hillary-clinton-s-presidential-campaign-has-begun>
— and viewing the prospect of a long and lightly contested primary — many
reporters greeted the news of Biden’s possible entry Saturday, via Maureen
Dowd, like manna from heaven.

“I mean, who wouldn’t root for a real race, right?” Mark Leibovich, the
chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, wrote in an
email to POLITICO. “And it’s not just a ‘reporters craving good copy’
thing, either. … [It’s] good for America!”

And when the Times itself reported on Dowd’s scoop hours later, it noted
that Biden’s entry “would add an unbridled, often unscripted passion for
the presidency that some Democrats say the ever-cautious Mrs. Clinton
sometimes lacks.”

Asked for her own thoughts on how Biden might affect the race, Dowd
demurred. “I don’t predict,” she told POLITICO. “I just report.”

What she reported was itself enough to set off a flurry of Biden stories:
Per Dowd, Biden is considering a run because that’s what his son Beau told
him to do before dying of brain cancer. “Beau was losing his nouns and the
right side of his face was partially paralyzed,” Dowd reports “But he had a
mission: He tried to make his father promise to run, arguing that the White
House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be
better off with Biden values.”

As Bloomberg’s John Heilemann observed in a Monday column
<http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-08-03/where-joe-biden-is-coming-from>,
“The irresistible narrative of a father running to fulfill his
cancer-stricken son’s deathbed wish” would all but guarantee “many weeks,
if not months, of soft, forgiving, at times gushing coverage.”

If Clinton is viewed as someone who (rightly or wrongly
<http://www.amazon.com/Big-Girls-Dont-Cry-Everything/dp/143915029X>) has a
difficult relationship with the political press, the vice president is
often talked about as being just the opposite. He loves the media
spotlight, talks off-the-cuff, and is prone to headline-making gaffes.

If Clinton says too little, Biden, to the delight of the press corps, says
too much. Clinton is the candidate who cordons the press off to keep them
at a distance while Biden holds an annual summer squirt-gun fling
<http://www.businessinsider.com/joe-biden-squirt-gun-fight-2014-6> for
reporters and their kids.

Staring down the barrel of this late-summer Biden-media love affair,
Clinton loyalists are already dismissing the rumored candidacy as theater.

“For understandable reasons, the August Fourth Estate along with the
chattering class (of which I am a card-carrying member), is always
interested in the theater of politics,” Chris Lehane, the crisis
communications guru who spent six years in the Clinton White House, said
when asked how Biden’s entry might affect the race. “This is the theater
primary, which is somewhere below the theater of the absurd — but has high
entertainment value.”

Spokespeople for the Clinton campaign did not respond to a request for
comment. But they have not lately been silent about their candidate’s
treatment in the press.

Just last week, the Clinton campaign sent a nearly 2,000-word letter to the
Times, complaining of “egregious” reporting errors in a July 23 article
about the former secretary of state’s private email account.

The scale of their counterattack mystified some journalists: “Who convinced
Hillary Clinton to pick a fight with The New York Times (and by extension
all of us)?” Ron Fournier, the senior political columnist at National
Journal, wrote on Twitter
<https://twitter.com/ron_fournier/status/626945727126720512>. Such a
response demonstrates just how cynical the political press corps is about
Clinton and her media team.

If Biden runs — and that remains a big “if” — there’s no guarantee that
he’ll get the “gushing” coverage some might expect. But what’s clear is
that he will garner the media’s attention in a way that other Democratic
challengers like Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley haven’t managed to do.

Of course, by courting the press and speaking his mind, Biden always seems
on the verge of self sabotage. After all, it was Biden who dropped out of
the 2008 presidential race after referring to Barack Obama as “the first
mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean”
<http://observer.com/2007/02/biden-unbound-lays-into-clinton-obama-edwards/>
in an interview with Jason Horowitz (then at The New York Observer and now
at the Times).

Biden has made his share of Clinton-related gaffes as well: In 2008, after
being tapped to join Obama’s ticket, Biden told a crowd in New Hampshire
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-says-hillary-might-be-a-better-vp/> that
Clinton was “as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president
of the United States of America.”

“She is qualified to be president of the United States of America, she’s
easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America, and
quite frankly, it might have been a better pick than me,” he said.

The very off-the-cuffness that gives Biden such appeal as a candidate among
reporters could be the thing that makes this a May-December affair.

As Lehane put it: “For anyone in this race or another race, the difference
between cheap theater and a classic is whether there is a [chance] there
for a second act.”
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Eric D. Schwerin
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