Joe Biden’s Obama Problem
Luke Thompson
12 hrs ago Wednesday night’s debate saw Joe Biden attacked for invoking . . . Barack Obama. New Jersey senator Cory Booker chastised the vice president for trying to have it both ways on his role in the Obama administration, invoking his work when advantageous but playing coy when politically helpful. Absentee New York City mayor Bill de Blasio inveighed against Biden as a proxy for Obama’s record on deportation.
This is a curious thing for a Democratic primary debate. Obama enjoys near-universal popularity among Democratic primary voters and is unlikely to endorse Biden, or anyone else for that matter. So what gives?
Two concrete issues are driving this odd development. First, the Democratic party is deeply divided over whether to preserve and extend Obamacare or scrap it in favor of a Medicare for All single-payer system. Second, the party has moved decidedly left on questions of immigration and now runs the gamut from default amnesty to open borders.
Yet the real cause of the issue is Biden’s strategy, or lack thereof, when it comes to invoking the 44th president. Biden uses Obama when he’s in a jam. If he feels backed into a corner, he automatically spits out (to paraphrase Biden’s own attack on then-candidate Rudy Giuliani) a noun, a verb, and “Barack Obama.â€
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http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/joe-bidens-obama-problem/ar-AAFelAz?ocid=ientp
