Colgate visit: Biden speaks of past, present, future
Friday - Mar 24, 2017 at 9:38 PM Mar 24, 2017 at 9:52 PM
ALEXANDRA CALDAS news@uticaod.com
"At the end of the day, I just couldn't do it," former Vice President Joe Biden said about running a campaign to be president. "So I don't regret not running. Do I regret not being president? Yes."
In Colgate University's Sanford Field House, University President Brian W. Casey opened the Kerschner Family Global Leaders series lecture question-and-answer panel with Biden by asking if Biden regrets not running to be president
"On a college campus I will never, never do anything other than answer the question completely unvarnished and straightforward," Biden said. "The answer is that I had planned on running for president. And although it would have been a very difficult primary, I think I could have won."
Biden said he had a lot of data collected and was fairly confident that as a Democratic party's nominee, he could have won.
[...] Colgate sophomore John Bennett, 19, a Democrat, was hoping to hear Biden speak on a variety of topics, including health care after President Donald Trump's bill for the American Health Care Act had failed to get enough support to pass earlier in the day before Biden's speech.
"I think it might be interesting to hear his take about foreign policy going forward with how we may be more isolationist in these coming years," he said.
[...] "I really hope he grows into the job a little bit," Biden said of Trump. "I don't have a lot of hope now. ... I hope that he succeeds."
What did give Biden hope, however, was the students in the room and their opportunities to create change.
"To all of you students assembled in this auditorium, we're counting on you," he said. "You understand this better than most of us."
Last two paragraphs, bullshit with a teleprompter. Clearly, the one sophomore pegged it, the man spun fluff and ducked policy commitment. Had he run, when the rumblings were loudest, he and the Podesta/Clinton clown car would have split the Inner Party, and Bernie could have won the Dem nomination, and soundly trounced Trump in the general election; as insurgent with a heart vs insurgent with a spiel. Biden left the inner party levers to Clinton, and as night follows day disaster followed that abdication. Had Biden run and squeezed Podesta/Clinton aside, just as happened but with Bernie also squeezed out by Inner Party forces, as happened, the progressives would have said "No dog of mine in that hunt" and it would have been Trump as insurgent with spiel vs entrenched elitist with spiel (as happened). Trump winning (as happened).
Biden should stay out of Elizabeth Warren's way to being the first female president, and the first in my lifetime with a progressive orientation; that being seven decades although I do not remember much of Truman during early childhood.
Biden is yesterday's fish. He is/would be warmed over Obama. That the man will not utter the needed words, "Single payer, universal health coverage as a right," puts out all anybody needs to know about the man from the state with the lowest common denominator of corporate law - Delaware, where all the multinationals incorporate, stateside, regardless of where they locate business sites or where offshore money gets parked and European coat hangers are used - Ireland being popular that way.
UPDATE: It would have been a hoot, however, to see Biden and Podesta/Clinton dancing the superdelegate shuffle (may that obscenity end, today being too late but better than tomorrow).