Chris Stirewalt on Joe Biden's 'successful' presidential campaign rollout: He hit his marks very nicely
Despite some skepticism, former Vice President Joe Biden outraised and 'out-bumped' Bernie Sanders, says Fox News political analyst Chris Stirewalt.
“Sleepy” Joe Biden is counting on his eight years as President Obama’s vice president to provide some sort of nostalgic boost for his third run for the White House in the past 32 years.
But “the problem with nostalgia” – to quote former Sen. John Edwards as he described the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton in 2007 – “is what we tend to do is only remember what you like and you forget the parts you didn’t like.”
The disgraced former Democratic senator from North Carolina was, of course, referring to the scandal-plagued administration of President Bill Clinton, which paved the way for the launch of seven independent counsel investigations by then-Attorney General Janet Reno.
The same thing holds true for Biden. Once you get past the warm and fuzzy nostalgia for Biden – the elder career politician chosen by the youthful Barack Obama as his running mate – reality slaps you right in the face.
The first thing you might remember about Biden’s record as Obama’s vice president is his description of the signing into law of ObamaCare as a “big f------ deal.”
The mainstream media cannot allow Biden to rewrite history when it comes to the Obama administration’s cozy Russia policy.
Biden, one of the prime supporters of the disaster that was disingenuously marketed as the Affordable Care Act, must answer for the lies told by the Obama team to sell the plan to the American people.
Infamous Obama lines such as “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” or “if you like the plan you have, you can keep it” – as well as the law’s central failure to control health care costs – all now fall squarely into Biden’s lap.
Nearly a decade later, our health care system is more expensive and less accessible. The left’s recent embrace of a policy that will end Medicare as we know it – or create “Medicare-for-all” as they spin it – is proof positive that ObamaCare was fatally flawed from the outset and it cannot be fixed.
One of the Obama-Biden administration’s top foreign policy objectives was known as the “Russia Reset.” The naïve Obama White House said in a fact sheet that the reset “sought to engage the Russian government to pursue foreign policy goals of common interest – win-win outcomes – for the American and Russian people.”
This wrongheaded policy, which President Obama said would give him “more flexibility,” enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin to lure the Obama-Biden team into a false sense of progress as the Russians meddled in our 2016 presidential election.
Unable to admit that their Russia policy was an abject failure at such a critical time, Obama and Biden chose to ignore Russia’s interference in our election instead of doing something to stop it.
The mainstream media cannot allow Biden to rewrite history when it comes to the Obama administration’s cozy Russia policy.
Biden must also be investigated fully over his alleged actions in Ukraine on behalf of his son Hunter and the investigation into Burisma Holdings, a company with a board of directors that included the younger Biden as a member. The excited cheerleaders in the liberal media must do the right thing and demand answers.
On the all-important issue of fighting for the American worker and manufacturing jobs, let’s remember that the position of the Obama-Biden administration on lost manufacturing jobs was – as Obama put it – that “some of those jobs of the past are just not going come back.”
That destructive attitude, along with an outrageous regulatory regime, caused a net loss of nearly 200,000 manufacturing jobs as a result of the lack of leadership of Obama and Biden.
Since President Trump took office, 453,000 manufacturing jobs have been created in just two years as a result of his can-do spirit, his Make America Great Again optimism, and his pro-growth economic policies.
In 2016 President Obama asked then-candidate Trump “what magic wand do you have” when it comes to bringing back manufacturing jobs? This showed Obama and Biden had no answers then on how to create new jobs – and nothing has changed since.
The failed Obama-Biden mindset of “you didn’t build that” – so critical of America’s entrepreneurial spirit – must never be forgotten.
Another horribly misguided Obama-Biden foreign policy decision was their 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. The deal was supposed to keep Iran from becoming a nuclear power for at least a few years.
In a dangerous push to concoct some sort of liberal foreign policy legacy – and after mislabeling ISIS the “JV team” – Obama and Biden gave up the store on a deal that put an exclamation point on their failed eight-year policy of apologizing for America around the world.
This 2016 headline on a news story in the Los Angeles Times – “Donald Trump is right: The U.S. did pay Iran $1.7 billion in cash” – tells you all you need to know. Why would the United States give that kind of funding to a country with leaders who chant “Death to America” and want to erase Israel from the map?
By contrast, the Trump administration is taking Iran’s well-deserved branding as the leading sponsor of terrorism seriously by designating its Revolutionary Guards as a foreign terrorist organization. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo aptly called the move a “basic reality.”
But when it comes to a reality-based America First foreign policy, Joe Biden doesn’t have a clue.
You can’t finish an analysis of Biden’s record as Obama’s vice president without asking this all-important question: When it comes to the Obama administration’s efforts to try to stop Donald Trump from being elected president, what did Biden know and when did he know it?
Biden received daily intelligence briefings as vice president. Now that he has made himself a public figure again, he needs to answer for the fake Russian dossier and tell the American people why ex-British spy Christopher Steele was given carte blanche to peddle his lies throughout the highest levels of the Obama-Biden administration.
The American people deserve to know the truth about the fraudulent Russia collusion narrative that was perpetrated on them for two years – and what senior officials in the Obama administration were responsible for it.
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Let’s face the fact that an enormous percentage of center-right voters in our country think the Obama-Biden administration was a total failure. Additionally, a large bloc on the left has absolutely no appetite for a Biden candidacy because they view him as a low-energy has-been and would prefer someone new.
So the natural question becomes: Is Joe Biden the Democratic version of Jeb Bush in 2020? Because we all remember how nostalgia failed to help Bush, who was handily defeated by Trump in the Republican primaries in 2016.
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