No candidate in Iowa has an entourage quite like Joe Biden's. On New Year's Eve, the Delaware senator dined at Baratta's Italian restaurant in Des Moines with 20 of his relatives. The next day, with temperatures in the single digits, he arrived at an Indianola, Iowa, campaign event, an hour south of the capital, on the arm of his 90-year-old mother, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden. His sister and national campaign chair, Valerie Biden Owens, introduced him to the 50 or so locals who had assembled. And then Biden began his remarks by cuddling his baby grandson, Hunter, and introducing three granddaughters, one son, one brother, two daughters-in-law, one sister-in-law, and a nephew.
The senator assured the crowd that his wife, oldest granddaughter, and niece were campaigning elsewhere in Iowa. You know, in case anyone doubted the Biden family's commitment to the first-in-the-nation caucus.
Laurie Soroka is a passionate Biden supporter from Des Moines who spent the day trailing the candidate through rural parts of the state. She ate the shtick up. "They're going to be the next Kennedy family!" Soroka gushed, referencing Biden's Irish Catholic roots. "I've met them all!" Indeed, Soroka hosted 80 people at her home last Sunday to hear from Biden and his one notable celebrity endorser, Richard Schiff, who played White House communications director Toby Ziegler on the TV show The West Wing, a fictional escape for disgruntled Democrats during the Bush years.
Soroka is a typical Biden convert: middle-aged, impressed with his decades of diplomatic work in the Senate, and nursing one or two special technocratic interests: second-tier policy areas that supporters believe Biden would be best prepared to advocate for, given his 35 years of legislative experience. For Soroka, vice president of the Polk County Communications Workers of America union, it's rural wireless Internet access, an issue around which Biden's campaign organized an event in November.
At a later campaign stop Tuesday in Knoxville, Biden heard from a woman who was impressed with a Senate bill he co-wrote to require insurance companies to equally cover mental-health care. And he never forgets to tout his leadership in passing the groundbreaking Violence Against Women Act of 1994. He's fond, à la anti-choice conservatives, of criticizing national feminist organizations for arriving late to the cause. "They were more concerned about the choice and gender issues," he intones. "While others talked, I got it done." (Eventually Biden partnered with the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, now known as Legal Momentum, to write the legislation.)
But make no mistake: This is a campaign about foreign policy, as any Biden supporter will tell you. The senator is also fond of name-dropping world leaders whom most voters are only barely cognizant of, such as Warren Christopher, secretary of state during the first Clinton administration, and Lord David Owen, his British counterpart during the genocide in Bosnia. Biden says both men failed to stand up for what was right, while he famously met with Slobodan Milosevic in secret one night in 1993, telling him to his face, "I think you're a damned war criminal."
The senator tells the story over and over again. His pitch asks Iowans to "close your eyes and imagine if the candidate you support were president this very moment, today. What degree of confidence do you have that they would know immediately what to do to end this war, to make sure Afghanistan doesn't fall into total chaos, to deal with the most dangerous nation in the world, Pakistan?"
Indeed, in the days since Benazir Bhutto's assassination, Biden has turned up the volume on his long-standing argument that the world is a scary, scary, place, and only an old hand like himself can bring it to heel. "Pakistan is bristling with nuclear weapons, bristling!" he said in Knoxville, using his trademark colorful prose. In Indianola, he whipped the crowd into a tizzy with his description of that faraway nation: "Pakistan is the country where Bin Laden lives and ten to fifteen percent of the population is radicalized! ... Imagine the jihadis in control of those weapons. They have weapons that can fly all the way to the Mediterranean!"
Biden's ideas on how to stabilize Pakistan don't differ much from those of his rivals. Like John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, he supports an international investigation into Bhutto's death, and like Barack Obama, he speaks cautiously about using American or international troops, alongside Pakistanis, to root al-Qaeda and the Taliban out of the nation's northern provinces and western border with Afghanistan. Biden also says he would give teeth to American requests that Pakistan's autocratic president, Pervez Musharraf, quickly hold democratic parliamentary elections by threatening to stop selling Pakistan the weapons and equipment it needs to keep pace with rival India, which is also nuclear-armed.
Like Clinton, Biden voted to authorize President George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq, though unlike Clinton, he subsequently apologized for that decision. This year, the Senate and House passed Biden legislation that would split Iraq into three federal states -- one for each of the country's ethnic groups -- and bring most American troops home within one year, leaving a small group behind to do police and anti-terrorism work. President Bush vetoed that legislation. So why isn't Biden getting more support from grassroots Democrats looking for a pragmatic way to end the war?
Of course, there's the fact that Biden's candidacy lacks the celebrity appeal of both Clinton's and Obama's, and that he rolled his campaign out with a series of embarrassing verbal gaffes. But it's more than that -- Biden's tone just doesn't jibe with a deeply held longing for peace and stability in the Democratic electorate. Even as he suggests that sober diplomacy and police work are the solution to terrorism, he tells voters to be scared. "My biggest fear is that George W. Bush has cried wolf so many times that Americans will think there isn't a real terror threat to our nation. There is," he said in Knoxville Tuesday. That's true, but when Biden suggested that terrorists might attack the football stadium at Iowa State University in Ames, it was reminiscent of Bush's pandering to rural voters during the 2004 election.
Given that Biden is in fifth place at 4 percent, according to the most recent Des Moines Register poll, you'd think he was actually running to be secretary of state. Yet it's difficult to imagine Biden serving under a President Hillary Clinton and playing second fiddle on the world stage to the first husband. Biden frequently paints Bill Clinton as an inexperienced young president taken in hand by a certain older senator with foreign policy bona fides during the 1990s.
As for Obama and Edwards, Biden told the crowd in Indianola, "I don't know them very well." Biden supporters are extremely skeptical of Obama in particular. "When I saw Barack Obama talking about foreign policy by reading off a piece of paper, I thought, 'Oh my god,'" Soroka said. In Knoxville, when Valerie Biden Owens asked Iowans if they dropped any balls on New Year's Eve, an audience member shouted out, "I can tell you about the ball! Obama's gonna drop the ball on Thursday!"
It seems that Biden caucus-goers have fully bought into the meme that Obama is too young and inexperienced in the ways of Washington to be president. If that's true, Clinton and Edwards may be the second-choices of many Biden supporters when their candidate fails to meet viability in most precincts. But the Biden faithful are still hoping for late-breaking undecided voters to flood into their camp, boosting their guy into third or fourth place and catapulting him toward New Hampshire on a wave of good press.
"How do we even know who they're polling?" harrumphed Soroka. "Biden will definitely make viability in my precinct."
