Brad Warthen EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
The State.com - South Carolina's Home Page
Sunday, 07 October 2007
Why should voters in South Carolina’s Democratic primary skip the front-runners to pick Joe Biden as their nominee for president?
Because, he explained to our editorial board last week, he’s the guy with the juice. He’s got the experience to have the knowledge, he has sound ideas based on that knowledge, and he’s got the credibility to sell the ideas.
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So who has the juice? Joe Biden does, as he had demonstrated a few days earlier.
The previous week, he had pulled off the apparent miracle of getting 75 members of the U.S. Senate — which meant getting a bunch of Republican votes — to vote for the centerpiece of the Biden platform: A plan to divide Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions under a loose federalist system.
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How did he sell the Senate on this?
First, “I’ve been working these guys and women for a year on it; I’m like a broken record on it.” He sold it on the merits, but it was also appealing because it didn’t involved the constitutional problem of trying to tell the commander in chief how many troops he can send where when.
But it also came down to juice, to credibility: “I think if you ask Lindsey or you ask other Republicans, they trust me; I don’t ever play a game with them. I think that they think I know something about this issue, and I have not been one who is saying things that they know is not rational.”
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What about bringing troops home?
“What I don’t want to do is fly under false colors here. I don’t want to tell the American people that if this plan is adopted, all Americans come home,” he said.
“If this plan were adopted, it’s the only way in which you could justify keeping American forces there.”
But if it weren’t adopted, unlike his rivals, he’d get the troops out right away.
“I would not withdraw from the region. But I’ll be damned if I’m gonna continue to have my son’s generation stuck in a position where they’re on the fault line, and the only thing they’re there to do is keep things from getting worse,” without any prospect of them getting better.
So that’s his deal: He’s the guy with the plan, and the juice to get it done. And last week, he had the cred to make folks believe it.
http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2007/10/hold-this.html