Ryan's Solutions Vs. Biden's Gaffes
IBDEditorials.com
Ineptitude: It seems absurd today, but Joe Biden was named running mate to add substance and intellectual heft to the Obama ticket. The vice president of comic relief ended up being a four-year-long insult to Americans.
The comparison between President Obama's choice of Joe Biden for vice president and Mitt Romney's decision of Paul Ryan couldn't be more stark.
Ryan, at just 42, has risen to become the intellectual policy leader of the Republican Party — no mean feat considering this is a party whose economic ideas powered America into the 1980s' boom and planted the seeds for the 1990s' technological revolution.
At great political risk for a GOP congressman in a traditionally Democratic district, Ryan chose to work hard on solutions to grave fiscal problems that, left unaddressed, will cripple America. Name another politician in either party in the last half-century who has done this.
Biden, on the other hand, is class clown, and has been for decades. This supposed foreign policy wise man in 2007 sought to divide Iraq into three semi-autonomous countries, one for Shiites, one for Sunnis and one for Kurds.
His 1988 run for the presidency — as one of the "Seven Dwarfs," along with eventual nominee Mike Dukakis — disintegrated after he plagiarized a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock — a speech that, incredibly, mixed up Kinnock's life story with Biden's.
As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1987, Biden presided over the character assassination of President Reagan's Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, inaugurating a new era of viciousness in politics that continues to plague Washington.
Then there are gaffe-meister Biden's verbal follies.
Telling a largely black crowd in Virginia on Tuesday that "They gonna put y'all back in chains" is just the latest in a litany of mean-spirited buffoonery.
He's claimed that "when the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television." But Americans in 1929 didn't own TVs, and Hoover was president.
Biden has called Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean ..."
He once remarked that "you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent."
He once implored a wheelchair-confined Missouri state senator to stand up during a rally.
But on top of all that, widely reported at the time of the Kinnock plagiarism was Biden's plagiarism at Syracuse Law School in the mid-1960s, in which he quoted some five pages of someone else's work without citation and was given an F (raised to a B on appeal).
Moreover, senator Biden routinely plagiarized lines from figures like Bobby Kennedy, John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.
His vice presidency has been a four-year-long vaudeville act, but more seriously Biden — one heartbeat from the presidency — personifies President Obama's ongoing misguided judgment.