Subject: Joe Biden’s Respect Calculation - The New Yorker
From: "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>
To: "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>, "Alexander S. Mackler" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2015 11:14:43 -0400

> http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/joe-bidens-respect-calculation <http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/joe-bidens-respect-calculation>
> 
> Joe Biden’s Respect Calculation
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>   <http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Osnos-Joe-Bidens-Respect-Calculation-1200.jpg>
> Joe Biden is unlikely to run for President for a third time if it means a year of trailing Hillary Clinton in the polls. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY OLIVIER DOULIERY/GETTY
>  <> <>For observers of Joe Biden <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/28/biden-agenda>—and anyone who wonders whether he will challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Presidential nomination—there was a small, telling moment in April, 2014, during a routine interview with “CBS This Morning.” <http://www.bizpacreview.com/2014/04/17/really-awkward-moment-when-obama-refuses-to-endorse-biden-for-president-plugs-hillary-right-in-front-of-him-113165> Vice-President Biden and President Barack Obama were side by side when the reporter, Major Garrett, asked about the 2016 race. Biden gave the ritual denials (“If I decide to run, this is the first guy I’d talk to, but that decision hasn’t been made”) before Obama lavished praise upon him as “a great partner in everything I do.” Then Obama began to talk about someone else: “I suspect that there may be other potential candidates for 2016 who have been great friends and allies. We’ve got an extraordinary Secretary of State who did great service for us, for me and Joe.” Biden looked away, then back to the President, with a strained smile. It was no endorsement of Hillary Clinton. It was nothing—unless you want to know how Joe Biden makes decisions.
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> Over the weekend, Biden supporters sent up a trial balloon <http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/joe-bidens-big-decision> to see what the world would think of the Vice-President joining the race. Maureen Dowd reported <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/opinion/sunday/maureen-dowd-joe-biden-in-2016-what-would-beau-do.html?ref=opinion> that, shortly before Beau Biden <http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/we-bidens-an-american-family>, the Vice-President’s eldest son, died of a brain tumor, in May, he encouraged his father to run. Some of Biden’s advisers have been contacting uncommitted Democratic donors, seeking to test their ability to marshal a campaign in a hurry, to measure Clinton’s vulnerability, and to see whether Biden might tap the evident desire for a non-Clinton option, which has fuelled the surprising early success of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
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> Reaction to the Biden prospect <http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-considers-his-future-amid-pressure-to-make-a-bid-for-president/2015/08/01/020e7112-388e-11e5-9739-170df8af8eb9_story.html> has been polite but practical. My colleague Ryan Lizza asked <https://twitter.com/RyanLizza/status/627849460358340608?lang=en> where Biden’s advantage over Clinton was in various areas—youth, gender, broad party support, “lefty cred,” money, and campaign strength—and found none. There was a time when Biden (who is almost five years older than Clinton) thought he had an angle, at least on lefty cred. Early last year, he began to stake out a populist economic appeal, telling a United Auto Workers audience, “You guys are the only guys keeping the barbarians at the gates, man.” He warned that conservatives have launched “a concerted, full-throated, well-organized, well-financed, well-thought-out effort waging war on labor’s house.” Since then, Sanders has staked out that territory, leaving Biden less room to maneuver.
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> But another factor that, for the moment, weighs against a Biden run has more to do with his chemistry than with his competition. While reporting a Profile <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/28/biden-agenda> last year, I heard him return over and over to matters of respect. His father, Joseph Robinette Biden, Sr., was a car salesman who quit a stable job because his boss was imperious. One of Biden’s old-world, Scranton sensibilities is that he never forgets who afforded him respect and who withheld it; he still talks about the grade-school students who humiliated him for a childhood stutter, and his aides learn quickly that Biden hates nothing more than embarrassment. A former adviser recalled prepping Biden to ask a European leader for a favor; when the leader unexpectedly said no, Biden froze: “He hangs up the phone, and he’s like, ‘Don’t ever set me up like that again. It’s O.K. if we can’t move the ball; I’ll still make the call, but you’ve got to tell me.’”
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> As a candidate, Biden would have to contend, once again, with the plagiarism scandal that drove him out of the 1988 race, and, given the choice between spending the next year as a trusted Vice-President or a third-time candidate trailing Hillary Clinton, Biden would likely be reluctant to subject himself to it. Then again, if that changes—if Clinton’s favorability drops sharply, or if she looks wounded, don’t expect Biden to defer to her (or to Bernie).
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> If Biden doesn’t run, his greatest assist to his party will be if he can help Clinton find a way to leverage his most enduring asset: his willingness to express the kind of authentic emotion that is rare in American politics. It is a cliché to note that Clinton’s strongest moment as a candidate came in 2007, when she choked up before voters in New Hampshire, but it’s still true. Biden generates that kind of connection with people more frequently—often outside of public view. In “Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland <http://publishersweekly.com/9780525427650>,” two women who were kidnapped by the school-bus driver Ariel Castro and later escaped recalled meeting Biden at the White House. Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus thought that they were there for a quick grip-and-grin. He sat with them for forty-five minutes, and then invited them to lunch—while he pushed off other meetings and told them about the car accident, in 1972, that killed his wife and daughter. In their memoir, written with the journalists Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan, Berry recalled the encounter:
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>  <> <>His eyes are filling with tears and we’re all starting to cry, too.
> “I didn’t have the courage to deal with it,” he says. “I just kind of quit. I didn’t have the strength to confront it.”
> He leans in close and looks me right in the eyes: “Like you do.”
> Then he turns to Gina: “And you do.”
> I think to myself that it’s amazing how he got over his pain and accomplished so much. If he can do it, so can I. He was twenty-nine when that accident happened, and I’m twenty-eight. I have a new life ahead. And he’s right: after what I’ve been through, I can face anything. He’s not afraid to cry, and I don’t have to be, either.
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> In his speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, he said, “Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.” In the end, the only trait in Bidenworld that matters nearly as much as respect is perseverance.
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Eric D. Schwerin
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