Dr. Abdul Ruff
In one sentence one could say Joseph Biden had no chance at all either to win the Democratic nomination or US presidency. However, it is really worthwhile to know the possible reasons that forced the Vice President, who should be the natural choice of party for Presidential candidature, to opt out of presidential contest.
The Democratic Party and President Obama may have found out that Mrs. Clinton as former state secretary can pursue capitalist agenda of US corporate lords and their war agenda effectively than Biden would. This underscores the highly manipulated character of the election campaign in both of the capitalist parties.
Obviously, the Joe Biden trial balloon was floated, failed to gain altitude, and crashed to earth more than three months before the first votes are cast in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Biden withdraws candidature
Convinced that he is an irrelevant candidate for US presidency, US Vice President Joseph Biden readily announced in the White House Rose Garden on 21 October, in the presence of President Barack Obama, that he would not be a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. His open declaration has put to rest all speculative exercises about his plan for presidency.
A possible Biden candidacy never attracted any great popular following. He never passed the 20 percent mark in polls of likely Democratic primary and caucus voters, an exceedingly low mark for a sitting vice president. He invariably placed third in the polls, behind Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
Both the Democratic Party establishment and its base of wealthy political donors have stayed in the Clinton camp. Clinton has amassed a war chest of $75 million already, while the Sanders campaign has raised $40 million. Biden’s supporters have not even opened a bank account.
The Democratic Party establishment was keeping Biden in reserve, in case the Clinton campaign disintegrated, buffeted by a combination of Republican attacks, including over her use of a private email server while she was serving as Obama’s secretary of state, and a lack of popular enthusiasm.
However, favourable media coverage of Clinton’s performance in the first Democratic debate October 13 has helped drive up her poll numbers. The Republican investigations into Clinton’s emails and her role in the attack on a US mission in Benghazi, Libya in 2012, in which four American diplomats and security officers died, suffered a self-inflicted blow when House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitted that they had been used to damage Clinton’s political standing in the 2016 elections.
Some commentators, however, claim that Biden was determined to contest on Democratic ticket but was pulling out with reluctance, and even some bitterness.
Policy hotchpotch
As a close associate of Obama, Biden was all praise for his boss. He very proudly said: President Obama has led this nation from crisis to recovery, and we’re now on the cusp of resurgence.
Biden was referring to ‘recovery’ not of the nation or common people but of the Wall Street financial elite, who have fully recovered their losses from the 2008 crash and gone on to new heights of wealth and privilege, while the vast majority of common people have experienced seven years of economic stagnation, declining living standards and incessant attacks on public services and jobs.
Economic slides of the nation affect mainly the poor and common people who bear the brunt of all crises in national economy. All austerity masseurs and price rises affect them more than any other rich sections of nations. Governments make polices to suit the interests and requirements of the rich and corporate lords because literally they control the government and parliaments.
Biden was implicitly opposing the mild criticisms of the Obama government voiced by another Democratic hopeful Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the course of his rhetorical attacks on Wall Street influence in Washington. He also rejects any adaptation to Sanders by former secretary of state Clinton in an effort to win over his supporters. Biden criticized Mrs. Clinton as well, asking her not to make any concessions to the Sanders campaign, as in opposing the Obama government on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, for instance.
Bipartisan foreign policy
It is a known fact both the Republican and Democratic parties have tacit political and tactical understanding on domestic and foreign polices and generally Israel and its Jewish lobbyists in Washington decide polices for White house. Biden called for reaching a consensus with the Republicans, warning, “Four more years of this kind of pitched battle may be more than this country can take.” The implication of this statement is remarkable. More than a year before the 2016 election, the No. 2 in the Democratic Party and government is effectively calling for bipartisan unity on the basis of a right-wing agenda approved by the Republicans.
Of course, Mrs. Clinton’s passage for US presidency by the Democratic Party is not the end of the story: she has an uphill task further as the Republicans are upbeat that Obama and his Democratic Party, instead of taking a new path from war strategy of Bush regime, chose to follow the footsteps of his disastrous predecessor, and even accelerated the Bush war by invading/attacking Libya and Syria, killing thousands more of Muslims as US agenda.
That appears to be the real bipartisan policy of USA.
Source: Weekly Holiday
