Analysis: Joe Biden’s head-scratching democracy speech
In this week’s State of the Union address, Vice President Joe Biden said what so many Americans have been thinking over the past few months: That he and President Obama are a lot more alike than they have been willing to admit.
In this week’s State of the Union address, Vice President Joe Biden said what so many Americans have been thinking over the past few months: That he and President Obama are a lot more alike than they have been willing to admit.
What’s not to like about a man who tells us, with refreshing candor, that he, too, has wondered at times if he is more like his grandmother than he was willing to admit.
No sooner had President Obama addressed the nation on Thursday morning than he delivered a speech that, in retrospect, was destined to become a defining moment for his presidency, if not for his legacy. In that speech, he laid out an unprecedented — and deeply unpopular — plan to bring down the deficit through two rounds of spending cuts.
Biden’s speech came as the country was in the midst of the most acrimonious debate over the deficit since the days of Ronald Reagan, and as the 2012 election campaign was already heating up. It was also the most direct example yet of the Democratic Party’s increasingly ambitious agenda of debt reduction — while trying to make the case that Obama is trying to do the same thing and Democrats will come to the rescue.
Now, nearly a year into Obama’s second term and a full year after the president and his Democratic allies launched their debt-reduction strategy, there are unmistakable signs that the president’s plan is on the ropes.
Biden knows this. He addressed a joint session of Congress in which he detailed it in explicit terms. And he made it crystal clear that the next president may have to try to make the deficit smaller — but not by simply cutting spending, but by asking taxpayers to do a lot of the cutting.
For Biden, the difference between what Obama has done as president and what he wants to do, and what Democrats will be able to get from the next president, is pretty straightforward.
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