Joseph Biden

Understandably, Joe Biden’s campaign-ending bout with plagiarism two decades ago has been getting its share of attention over the past 24 hours, with the Clinton campaign drawing a parallel with Barack Obama’s lift of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s words.

Certainly, Mr. Obama’s delivery of the passage in question was pretty much identical, as the video evidence now available on YouTube clearly shows. So why isn’t it being treated with the same gravity?  read more »

Every time the Democratic eight gather for yet another debate, it is Mr. Biden who turns in the most consistently presidential performance of any candidate from either party.  read more »

The analogy to the Dean campaign, if not the questioning of Mr. Edwards’ motives and timing, is hardly a stretch.  read more »

Officially, Joe Biden is running for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. But the job Mr. Biden may really be eyeing is that of Secretary of State.  read more »

Failure in Iraq is bad for America, worse for Darfur.  read more »

Andrew Cuomo got the nation's largest student loan company to curb its business practices and pay $2 million to educate the public about the industry.

Unlike George Pataki, Eliot Spitzer based his federal PAC in New York.

Joe Bruno promised to a problem with the Saratoga Springs.

Christine Quinn is getting members in line to override the mayor veto of a cap on pedicabs.

The city comptroller wants to know if Wal-Mart spied on its shareholders.

 read more »

A day after they ditched a planned FOX debate, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards will participate in a "virtual town hall" discussion this evening in the (presumably) more ideologically friendly confines of Air America radio.

The Big Three, along with Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and Dennis Kucinich, will engage in a conversation entirely dedicated to the subject of Iraq and co-hosted by MoveOn.Org. Air America will be streaming it live 7:00 p.m to 8:30 p.m. tonight.

Said newly minted radio mogul Mark Green in an email: "We expect an historic night in what promises to be a defining election."

--Jason Horowitz

Hillary Clinton spoke privately to a gay political organization today.

Hillary is ahead in Joe Biden's home state.

Michael Cooper has more details about Eliot Spitzer's fight over health care spending and notes 1199 consultant Jennifer Cunningham's response: "We're not crybabies."

There's a small residency question about Eliot Spitzer's upstate economic czar.

Henry Stern liked Spitzer's presentation this morning, and thinks Spitzer has the potential for excellence.

The federal government will pay 75 percent of the cost to clean up areas buried in the record-breaking snowstorm.

Rock Hackshaw sort of quit blogging on Room 8, and complains that some people have no blog etiquette.

"It wouldn't be Philadelphia without one candidate throwing racial slurs at an opponent," notes Harry Siegel.

And above is Eliot Spitzer explaining how health care money ought to be spent.

-- Azi Paybarah

Biden on Iraq   To the Editor:    read more »

Biden on Iraq   To the Editor:    read more »

Biden on Iraq   To the Editor:    read more »

Senator Joseph Biden doesn’t think highly of the Iraq policies of some of the other Democrats who are running for President. To hear him tell it, Hillary Clinton’s position is calibrated, confusing and “a very bad idea.” John Edwards doesn’t know what he’s talking about and is pushing a recipe for Armageddon in the Middle East. Barack Obama is offering charming but insubstantial fluff. And all of them are playing politics. “Let me put it this way,” Mr. Biden said. “You didn’t hear any one of them get in this debate at all until they announced for President.” Mr. Biden, who ran an ill-fated campaign for President in 1988, is a man who believes his time has finally come, announcing this week that he was filing papers to make his 2008 Presidential bid official.  read more »

I went to Al Sharpton's radio studio yesterday to watch him chat with Joe Biden, who phoned in to assauge Sharpton by expressing regret over his remark's describing Barack Obama as "clean" in yesterday's Observer.

Sharpton welcomed Biden to the program and then praised him for not trying to backtrack or wiggle out of his remarks.

"You have stood straight up on this," said Sharpton.

Sharpton, aformer presidential candidate, nonetheless took issue with the notion that Barack Obama was the first "articulate" and "clean" mainstream African American candidate for president. He asked Biden if that's what he said.

"Al, that's exactly what I said," said before quickly adding that the intention of his comment was to compliment Obama as someone new and fresh and exciting in American politics. He also offered the first of many compliments and peace makers to Sharpton.

"You're one of the most articulate people in the country," he said.

Sharpton said the problem he had with the describing Obama as clean was that it insinuated that since Obama is "Harvard trained" he somehow different from the other black candidates who have come before him, and, as a result, is "less connected to the African American community."

Biden said he understood that concern among black leaders like Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

"I get it and that's what I regret," Biden said, stressing that he himself came of political age during the civil rights movement, to which he feels closely connected.

"That's where I come from," Biden said.

Sharpton then turned uncharacteristically optimistic, and said that he hoped all the focus on Biden would give the Senator the chance to raise the level of public attention on issues important to the black community. Biden in turn talked about the government's failure in Katrina and Iraq.

After a commercial break, during which Sharpton answered his phone, watched some television and checked the Internet, Biden began a full scale schmooze offensive.

Speaking about social justice issues, Biden said, "Al, you have been the one driving this, you have been the one driving this since the last campaign." He pointed out that as a Senator, he had a 100 percent voting record with the NAACP and a "very high" record with civil rights groups. He emphasized that he wasn't in anyway criticizing Sharpton, Jackson or Shirley Chisholm and reiterated his explanation that his use of the word "clean" to describe Obama in this case could be substituted with "fresh."

"I have overwhelming respect for you and what you did," said Biden.

With that, there was a hiss of dead air, and it seemed that Biden's line had dropped.

Sharpton asked if he was still there. Biden said he was.

"I thought you were drowning in giving me flattery," said Sharpton.

Biden ignored the quip and continued. He said he was "going to compete for every black vote," an assertion that literally raised Sharpton's eyebrows.

After the interview, Sharpton told reporters that "in some weird way" Biden might be bringing issues important to blacks to the fore and, though he though Biden's remark went "a step passed George Allen's calling an Indian Macaque" he didn't want to go after Biden, because it would seem suspicious if he, as a potential candidate, tried to knock an announced candidate out of the race.

--Jason Horowitz

Is Joe Biden a brilliant tactician?

Time wonders is Barack Obama is black enough.

Hillary Clinton likes bloggers so much, she granted an interview to one.

Eliot Spitzer is spending his own money to promote the budget he proposed.

Rudy Giuliani's alleged ex-girlfriend is throwing him a fund-raiser.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom admitted to having an affair with his former campaign manager's wife.

Empire Zone explains why David Paterson should not teach.

Moe Razvi is getting a lot of money from the city Campaign Finance Board.

The preview of the video that'll be shown at Craig Johnson's event tonight is here.

Chuck Bennett says hello to the city's new taxi and limousine commissioner. The Working Families Party is asking people not to attend a fundraiser hosted by the party's disputed Suffolk County chairman.

Al Franken is running for office.

R.I.P. Molly Ivins.

And pictured above is Joe Bruno shortly after another press conference in Albany.

-- Azi Paybarah

Senator Joe Biden's presidential kickoff didn't go as originally planned.

In a speech in New York yesterday, President Bush said that Congress doesn't need to change the Sarbanes-Oxley law on corporate accountability, but that "we need to change the way the law is implemented." [subscription]

A transcript of Bush's chat with the Wall Street editorial board is here. [subscription]

Eliot Spitzer's budget increases spending at twice the rate of inflation, but cuts $1.2 billion from health care.

So add health care workers among the list of groups with whom Spitzer is fighting.

EJ McMahon says Spitzer's budget is the biggest spending surge since 1998.

The Times editorial board, on the other hand, lauds it as "one of the boldest, bravest budget proposals in Albany in many years."

Spitzer's claim about having "done more in three weeks than any governor has done in the history of the state" is sort of accurate.

But he must still play his cards right, warns Errol Cockfield.

Jill Gardiner previews tonight's faceoff between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards when they both speak in front of the same pro-Israel group in midtown.

By the way, Hillary has no home-field advantage, according to Errol Louis.

Fred Barnes thinks Hillary is already becoming too liberal for the general election. [subscription]

Clarence Norman allegedly threatened to kick off the ballot a judge who didn't pay his friends.

And Harvard is not in Bill Clinton's future.

-- Azi Paybarah

So there's been a lot of interest in Jason Horowitz's piece on Joe Biden in this week's Observer, and we've gotten a number of requests from readers who want to listen to the interview.

As is often the case when Biden speaks his mind, there's no shortage of material. In the story, we led with the fact that he savaged the Iraq plans of fellow Democratic presidential contenders Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, and that he did so in unusually personal terms.

We also noted that Biden chose to describe Obama using adjectives like "articulate" and "nice-looking," to which a spokesman for Obama responded by saying that Biden's words "speak for themselves."

That was the part that Drudge picked up and ran with. There's now a debate going on at Talking Points Memo about whether the addition of a comma before the word "who" in this sentence -- "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" - would have affected its meaning.

Anyway, listen for yourself.

Here's Joe Biden on Hillary, Obama and Edwards.

-- Josh Benson

Jason Horowitz has an interview with Joe Biden that's going to shift the debate among Democrats over America's options in Iraq. Biden -- one of the party's most prominent voices on foreign policy -- tells Horowitz that Hillary Clinton's plan would be a disaster, that Barack Obama hasn't offered anything of substance and that John Edwards doesn't know what he's talking about at all.

Biden, who's running for president, also wonders why Hillary Clinton isn't more popular.

Michael Calderone reports on Dean Baquet's return to the Times.

Matt Schuerman writes about an apostle of congestion pricing.

Steve Kornacki explains why Chuck Hagel is the John McCain.

And Joe Conason thinks the Bush administration is heading for disaster with its Iran policy.

-- Josh Benson

Hassan Nemazee is a very powerful Democratic fund-raiser.    read more »

Following up on this story today, Congressman Jerrold Nadler just called in to say that he will be introducing his own bill within the next few days to try to force a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq by limiting funding for the war.

"You have got to use funding -- it's the only real enforcement congress has," he said.

Nadler said he recognized that slashing funds is politically problematic in that any restrictions on funding for the war will be portrayed as an abandonment of the troops.

"The way around that is not to cut the funding but to condition the funding," he said, explaining that his bill will "say no funds appropriated at all except for the following purposes: One, protect the troops. Two, withdraw on the following timetable. Three, reconstruction to help Iraq. And four, diplomacy to set up international conferences."

Nadler says the bill will also include a measure that bars any funds for increasing troops at any time.

Just to be clear, this is a longshot.

For the bill to go anywhere, it needs the support of the Democratic leadership. (Nadler says that, so far, Maurice Hinchey of New York, Lynn Woolsey of California and Jim McGovern of Massachusetts have expressed interest in supporting the measure.)

And even if such a bill made it far enough to come before the executive, President Bush would be likely to veto it.

"You put this as a limitation on the appropriations bill," said Nadler. "If he vetoes it he has no money."

And what about Democrats like Sen. Joe Biden, who has said that Congress "micromanaging" the war through legislative restrictions is unconstitutional?

"I don't agree with Biden," Nadler said. "You can certainly condition use of funds. The basic problem that you have is that you've got a stubborn jerk in the White House who will ignore anything and do what he wants to do."

--Jason Horowitz

The idea of dividing Iraq into a Federalist system with three autonomous regions once had some currency amongst Democrats seeking alternative approaches in Iraq. Now it is all but abandoned.

The idea, associated most closely with Leslie Gelb, the President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, gained traction when it was endorsed by Joseph Biden, the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a possible presidential candidate. The two coauthored a widely noted op-ed in the New York Times endorsing "Unity Through Autonomy".  read more »

At an appearance last night by Senator (and prospective presidential candidate) Joe Biden at a meeting of the Israel Policy Forum at the Times Square Marriot last night, I caught up with Congressman Jerry Nadler to talk about the storyline of the day.

He told me that Hillary Clinton had called him earlier yesterday to tell him that she was leaning towards running for president, and that he said he would support her.

His choice, he explained, was a pragmatic one.

"I don't see a lot of other good possibilities in our party," said Nadler, standing just a few feet from Biden and a few blocks from Obama. "Someone like Barack Obama, who is suddenly a real candidate, always worries me, because he is a novice candidate. He hasn't done it before. Novice candidates, not always, but 95 percent of the time make a mistake. I made some terrible mistakes in office, when I was district leader, no one remembers what they are. I wasn't in front of all the news cameras."

--Jason Horowitz

Even Leslie Gelb, the intellectual godfather of the plan to separate Iraq into three autonomous and ethnically homogenous regions, was taken aback by Sen. Chuck Schumer's recent expression of support for the idea. "It surprised me too," said Gelb, who is the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. "It's a conversion, because he told me that he thought I was full of it."

Gelb first tried to bring Schumer around to his way of thinking in mid-2005. "We had a conversation here at some length, at my apartment, where he wasn't impressed with it," Gelb said, referring to his proposal to divide the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish populations into three distinct geographic regions with the goal of preventing further sectarian bloodshed.

Gelb said he had the opportunity to convince Sen. Joe Biden, now the proposal's most vocal proponent, on a grounded shuttle flight between New York and Washington.

"I converted Biden thanks to the happenstance of a stalled shuttle," said Gelb. "I got on a shuttle about 9 months ago and he sat down next to me and the thing was delayed two and a half hours, on top of the trip. We did nothing but talk about this."

According to Gelb, the flight ended with Biden turning to him and saying, "Well, you convinced me now you have to convince my staff."

--Jason Horowitz

It took every last ballot they could scrounge up in Virginia last week to lift Democrats, by the slimmest margin possible, to control of the Senate for the first time in four years.

Swelling their ranks in 2008, though, shouldn't require nearly as much nervous perspiration and nail-biting.

The reason is rooted in math: In the '08 round of Senate elections, Republicans will have 21 seats to defend, compared to the Democrats' 12. That means nine more opportunities for Democrats to flip GOP seats - some in otherwise blue state - than for Republicans to gain ground. In other words, the Democrats should be playing offense.

Call it one of the underappreciated consequences of success in politics. The Republican-rich class of senators set to face the voters in '08 is a product of the 2002 midterm cycle, when the GOP's electoral savagery - best encapsulated in the loathsome Georgia television spot that likened Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden - keyed a history-defying drive in which they held all but one of their Senate seats and actually wrested three from the Democrats.

But the shelf-life for big classes dominated by one party doesn't typically extend past year six. Recall the 44-state Reagan landslide of 1980, which unexpectedly vaulted the GOP to Senate control - while at the same time positioning eight Republican incumbents to be swept out of office in 1986, when Democrats won the chamber back.

Granted, it is too soon to say which party the national political environment will favor in '08 - a presidential election year, after all. Nor do we yet know the caliber of the individual candidates each party will recruit in potentially key races.

Still, look closer at which senators are up in two years - and, just as important, where they are up - and the early political cartography is indeed favorable to the Senate's new majority party. The American Prospect's blog suggests there could be "56 or more" Senate Democrats when the next president takes office. That number feels highs - neither party has controlled more than 55 seats since 1994 - but the point is well taken.

The first thing to consider is who will retire.

Only three '08 Senate Democrats seem like contenders for this category: John Forbes Kerry and Joe Biden - who, at least for now, are amusing themselves with a "Who Can Wage The More Absurd Presidential Campaign?" contest - and Frank Lautenberg, who will be 84 years old in two years.

None of those three are likely to hang it up, though. Kerry and Biden can both file for re-election in their home states months after being humbled in New Hampshire. And Lautenberg's exit, sort of like Joe Paterno's in football, is a perennial rumor, even if the man himself shows no signs of fatigue. No matter, Democrats would be heavily favored to retain all three seats, with or without the incumbents on the ballot.

Beyond that, just three '08 Democratic incumbents have immediate reason to worry: Mary Landrieu, whose career was saved in 2002 by New Orleans residents who may have left the state for good; Tim Johnson, who came within inches of losing his seat from red state South Dakota in '02; and Montana's Max Baucus, a fifth-termer who must always be politically vigilant in a state that President Bush won by 20 points in 2004.

But it's a different story for the GOP, which has a minimum of three very ripe '08 retirement prospects - each in an eminently winnable state for the Democrats.

Like Virginia, where 79-year-old John Warner, as difficult as he is to read, is unlikely to stick around the Senate much longer, now that he's been stripped of his Armed Services gavel. And Colorado, where two-term Republican Wayne Allard, re-elected with just 51 percent of the vote in 2002, would have to go back on a term limits pledge to run again in '08. And New Mexico, home of septuagenarian Pete Domenici, who has at times tooled around the Capitol in a scooter in recent years.

Those three states each already have one Democratic senator (senator-elect, in Virginia's case) and voted for the Democratic candidate in their most recent gubernatorial elections - prime pick-up targets for the party, in other words, if the GOP incumbents stand down.

And those are just the obvious GOP retirement prospects.

Ted Stevens of Alaska will be 85 in '08, though at least there the Republicans would be nearly assured of holding the seat. But North Carolina - a state that once sent John Edwards to the Senate and that has been governed by Democrats for 14 consecutive years - could get interesting if Elizabeth Dole, now 70 and licking the wounds from her horrific just-completed tenure as the chairwoman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, opts to become the second former senator in her home. And what if 70-year-old Pat Roberts bags it in Kansas-- where an exceedingly popular Democratic governor waits in the wings?

Then there are the Republicans who are certain to run again - facing potentially unpredictable blue state electorates. Norm Coleman in Minnesota, perhaps squaring off against Al Franken in what would be the most entertaining '08 race, and New Hampshire's John Sununu, who is praying his state's rock star Democratic governor doesn't catch Potomac Fever, are at the top of this watch list.

Of course, the Democrats' success this year makes having a banner year in '08 a virtual imperative for them. After all, their last two strong Senate years - 2000 and this year - involved the same class. So perhaps it's not too early to note that in 2012, 24 of the 33 seats up will be Democratic.

After the New School's announcement that Sen. John McCain would be giving next month's commencement speech caused an angry backlash, Bob Kerrey will tonight play host to a politician (and presidential candidate) more amenable to the left of center school. Delaware's Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. will speak at the school tonight, though he is expected to steer clear of presidential politics. The topic for discussion, economic issues concerning India and China, is not exactly the stuff that is likely to stir any controversy, or petitions. —Jason Horowitz