LITTLE DID THEY KNOW...:

The Unbraiding: Can the Democrats make themselves look tough? (Jeffrey Goldberg, March 21, 2005, The New Yorker)

Joseph Biden, the senior senator from Delaware, is the Democratic Party’s main spokesman on international affairs; he is also a man who, on occasion, seems not to know, when sentences leave his mouth, where they are going or what they are meant to convey. Sometimes, when he thinks that he may shock or amuse his listener, he begins by stating, “I’m going to get in trouble if I say this,” or, “This is a really outrageous thing to say, but . . . ” And so when I asked Biden, as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and one of John Kerry’s chief advisers on foreign policy during last year’s Presidential campaign, what advice he gave Kerry on how to convince voters that he was tough, Biden laughed and said, “I wish I could tell you. I wish I could tell you.” Then he told me.

At sixty-two, Biden has a cheerful vanity and an exuberant restlessness that make him seem far younger. Since the election, he has become a leader of a modest-sized faction—“the national-security Democrats,” in the words of Richard Holbrooke, an ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton—that includes the most hawkish members in the Democratic Party. Among them are Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards, Senator Evan Bayh, of Indiana, and Governor Bill Richardson, of New Mexico, along with a number of Clinton Administration foreign-policy officials, now in exile at think tanks scattered about Washington.

Biden can be eloquent in defense of his party, and in his criticism of President Bush, but his friends worry that his verbal indiscipline will sabotage any chance he might have to win the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2008.

...how indifferent their nominee would be to indiscipline.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 23, 2008 10:24 AM