As speculation continues to swirl over whether or not Biden will make a run for the Presidency in 2020, he has maintained a curious presence in the media in recent weeks and recently offered some pretty harsh critiques of the Clinton campaign when he sat down with the Los Angeles Times. Mimicking comments made by Neera Tanden which were exposed by Wikileaks, Biden suggested that Hillary lost primarily because she never "really figured out why she was running." Per The Hill:
Vice President Biden believes Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election in part because she never figured why she was running for the nation’s highest office.
“I don’t think she ever really figured it out,” Biden told the Los Angeles Times in an interview published Thursday. “And by the way, I think it was really hard for her to decide to run.”
“She thought she had no choice but to run,” he said. “That, as the first woman who had an opportunity to win the presidency, I think it was a real burden on her.”
Of course, Biden clarified that Clinton was ultimately nothing more than a martyr who simply had to run because she was the "first woman who had an opportunity to win the presidency."
With all due respect, we're not convinced Hillary was running because "she thought she had no choice but to run." What if the answer is more simplistic than that. What if Hillary simply couldn't relay her motivations for running because it wasn't politically expedient to do so. What if Hillary didn't visit WI, MI, PA and OH because she wasn't running to help those people and didn't care about their fate. What if Hillary's run was all about the Clinton's neverending, selfish lust for infinite power and wealth? Nah, the simplest answers are rarely right.
Playing a little Monday-morning QB, Biden recollects fearing that "his people" of the Midwest might turn on Democrats in 2016 due the "elitism" that had crept into the party's thinking.
“Son of a gun. We may lose this election,” Biden recalled thinking. “They’re all the people I grew up with. They’re their kids. And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist. But we didn’t talk to them.”
He said the Democratic Party as a whole suffered because "we were not letting an awful lot of people — high school-educated, mostly Caucasian, but also people of color — know that we understood their problems.”
There is “a bit of elitism that’s crept in” to party thinking, he said.
“I was trying to be as tactful as I could in making it clear that I thought we constantly made a mistake of not speaking to the fears, aspirations, concerns of middle class people,” he said.
In the campaign, “you didn’t hear a word about that husband and wife working, making 100,000 bucks a year, two kids, struggling and scared to death. They used to be our constituency.”
Meanwhile, shortly after saying that the people of the Midwest are not "racist" or "sexist," Biden explains that Trump won "working-class people" by appealing to their racism and sexism.
“I don’t think he understands working-class or middle-class people,” Biden said. “He at least acknowledged the pain. But he played to the prejudice. He played to the fear. He played to the desperation."
"There was nothing positive that I ascertained when he spoke to these folks that was uplifting."
While Joe stays quite about a future run, there is no doubt that the media has already chosen their challenger for 2020.