Biden—His Time? A New Poll Suggests he’d be Stronger than Mrs. Clinton. James Taranto
“What’s Vice President Joe Biden up to?” asks Bloomberg View’s Jonathan Bernstein, who answers: “He appears to be inventing a new form of presidential campaigning: The perpetual trial balloon”:
Biden has consistently declined to say whether he’s running or not. The deadline for his decision is always vaguely off in the future, long after other candidates (in both parties) have officially announced or dropped out of the running. The vice president has declined to do the things that candidates do: He has no staff in Iowa or New Hampshire. On the other hand, stories keep leaking about a possible late bid for the presidency.
We’re not sure about that. Last month we noted a Puffington Host report that was fairly specific about a deadline: “Biden is still very much considering a bid for the White House, people close to Biden say, and will make a final decision at the end of the summer, targeted for September.”
And while it’s true such a late start would have its disadvantages, it’s not as if Democrats have a lot of alternatives. For that the vice president can thank Hillary Clinton, who mostly cleared the field so as to make herself the inevitable nominee.
“Most likely, nothing will shake [Mrs.] Clinton’s hold on the nomination,” Bernstein insists—though he acknowledges “there’s always a chance that something could—scandal, health or some unforeseeable circumstance.” Hmm, what could that possibly be? In a footnote, Bernstein dismisses the obvious answer:
No, not the current e-mail flap. At least to date, there’s nothing to indicate that the party is particularly worried about it, at least not to the point of seriously considering dropping their presumptive nominee. Watch the high-profile politicians who have endorsed her; as long as none expresses major doubts, the nomination politics isn’t changing.
Seems to us that’s putting the cart before the horse, if you’ll forgive the cliché. Surely the pols who’ve already endorsed Mrs. Clinton are now a lagging indicator; we’d have rewritten the footnote’s concluding sentence as follows: “Watch the high-profile politicians who have endorsed her; if one expresses major doubts, the nomination politics has changed.”
At any rate, there is reason for worry in a new Quinnipiac swing-state poll. In Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, the survey tested Mrs. Clinton and Biden (as well as Bernie Sanders) in general-election match-ups against Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump.
The poll’s biggest loser is Scott Walker, who wasn’t even included in the general-election match-ups—unlike in previous polls of the three states in March and June and of three others (Colorado, Iowa and Virginia) in July. Several other GOP contenders were also dropped between June and July, presumably because it would be unwieldy to test so many of them while adding Biden and Sanders. But the new poll swaps Walker out for Trump. It also finds the Wisconsin governor languishing in the mid-single-digits among primary preferences of the three states’ Republicans.
Mrs. Clinton is doing considerably worse against the two Florida Republicans than in either of the preceding polls. Her only lead is against Bush in Ohio.
She trailed Bush by three points in Florida in March (42% to 45%), led him by four in June (46% to 42%) and trails him by 11 now (38% to 49%). In Ohio the decline came earlier: She led by nine in March (47% to 38%) and one in June (42% to 41%) and leads by two now (41% to 39%). In Pennsylvania, she led by six in March (46% to 40%) and four in June (45% to 41%) and trails by three now (40% to 43%).
Against Rubio in Florida, she led by two in March (46% to 44%) and three in June (47% to 44%) and trails by 12 now (39% to 51%). In Ohio she led by nine in March (47% to 38%) and three in June (45% to 42%) and trails by two now (40% to 42%). In Pennsylvania she led by four in March (46% to 42%), trailed by one in June (43% to 44%) and trails by seven now (40% to 47%).
As for Trump, she trails even him in Florida, by two points (41% to 43%) but leads by five in both Ohio (43% to 38%) and Pennsylvania (45% to 40%).
Biden outperforms Mrs. Clinton in eight of the nine match-ups. The lone exception is in Florida, where the vice president trails Bush by 13 points (38% to 51%). But he leads Bush by three in Ohio (42% to 39%) and trails him by only one in Pennsylvania (42% to 43%). Against Rubio, Biden trails by six in Florida (42% to 48%), leads by one in Ohio (42% to 41%) and trails by three in Pennsylvania (41% to 44%). And Biden leads Trump in all three states: by three in Florida (45% to 42%), 10 in Ohio (48% to 38%) and eight in Pennsylvania (48% to 40%).
The March and June polls didn’t test Biden, but in the July poll of Colorado, Iowa and Virginia the advantage was hers. As we noted at the time, the inevitable nominee and the vice president trailed Rubio by equal margins in Iowa, but she fared better than he in the other eight match-ups (which included Walker but not Trump).
“I had to come out because of all the foolishness going on,” groused longtime Clinton surrogate James Carville in an NBC interview Wednesday, reported by the Washington Examiner. “Of course there’s not a full-scale Democratic freakout. . . . Polls go up and down.”
That they do, but it’s been a while since Mrs. Clinton’s have gone up. It seems reasonable to assume the metastasizing email scandal is the primary reason why. On that subject, Carville sounds like a high-sodium version of Bernstein:
“It’s like all of the other stuff I’ve been through. It doesn’t amount to a hill of beans,” Carville said. “It’s just a bunch of people talking to each other, spinning themselves up over a pile of garbage.”
“People, what they need to do is just calm down and enjoy the race,” Carville said, adding further that he thought she did “fine” during her Tuesday press conference in which she was pressed over her emails.
Fine? You mean like for violating the law?
And the story continues to develop. A Reuters report yesterday further undermines Mrs. Clinton’s claim that she did not traffic in classified material. The State Department, as Reuters notes, has stressed that many of the emails have been newly stamped classified, which does not necessarily mean they were classified at the time they were sent and received:
The new [classification] stamps indicate that some of [Mrs.] Clinton’s emails from her time as the nation’s most senior diplomat are filled with a type of information the U.S. government and the department’s own regulations automatically deems classified from the get-go—regardless of whether it is already marked that way or not.
In the small fraction of emails made public so far, Reuters has found at least 30 email threads from 2009, representing scores of individual emails, that include what the State Department’s own “Classified” stamps now identify as so-called “foreign government information.” The U.S. government defines this as any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts.
This sort of information, which the department says Clinton both sent and received in her emails, is the only kind that must be “presumed” classified, in part to protect national security and the integrity of diplomatic interactions, according to U.S. regulations examined by Reuters.
“It’s born classified,” said J. William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. government’s Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). . . .
“If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by U.S. rules that is classified at the moment it’s in U.S. channels and U.S. possession,” he said in a telephone interview, adding that for the State Department to say otherwise was “blowing smoke.”
And a McClatchy Washington Bureau report suggests the State Department lacked the ability or will to do anything to safeguard the security of that information:
Despite a hack two years ago that publicly exposed Hillary Clinton’s emails, the State Department took no action to shore up the security of the former secretary of state’s private computer server.
A State Department official said the department could not do anything in response to the March 2013 hack of longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal because it occurred on a non-governmental computer system. . . .
National security and technology experts told McClatchy that the government should have taken immediate action, including implementing such security precautions as updating software and protecting passwords.
The failure to take any precautions also could have left Clinton’s server vulnerable to hackers, experts said.
Was Mrs. Clinton’s system hacked by spies for hostile powers, either during or after her tenure as secretary of state? Did her lawyers delete any classified material—perhaps unintentionally—before scrubbing the server? If the FBI can recover its contents, perhaps we’ll find out. If not, we’ll never know. In any case, it’s difficult to see how the continuing investigation could yield any information helpful to Mrs. Clinton’s political case.
Are Democrats really quite as unworried as Bernstein and Carville think? That question brings us back to the vice president. On Aug. 5 the New York Times ran a front-page story titled “Friends of Joe Biden Worry a Run for President Could Bruise His Legacy”: “They fret that Mr. Biden, as well known for his undisciplined, sometimes self-immolating comments as he is for his charm on the trail, could endanger Mr. Obama’s own legacy by injuring Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy and causing his party to lose control of the White House.” Example:
“People deeply care about him and admire him,” said one person who is personally close to Mr. Biden and has worked closely with him, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his relationship with the vice president. “But you obviously have to worry about the feasibility and ultimate impact of a run.”
Asked if people were eager to communicate that concern to Mr. Biden, this associate said, “It’s very hard to do.”
So they communicate it anonymously via the New York Times. Some friends!
A reader who sent us the piece at the time remarked: “One could of course say the exact same things about Mrs. Clinton running.” (Well, except for the bit about charm.) And now they are saying it. “Some of her supporters are looking to her to provide clarity—and less irritation with the topic,” the Times’s Maggie Haberman wrote in a brief online squib yesterday. “Mrs. Clinton has said that no voters question her about her email practices. She has held few spontaneous events, providing limited opportunity for it to come up. But among her supporters, the questions have lingered.”
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