My friend Dave Weigel -- who's one of only 14 or 15 Delaware residents living today! -- runs down the good and the bad of Joe Biden. It's a fair list. If you're looking for knocks on Biden, his awful record hyping the drug war, and his dispiriting post-9/11 performance on civil liberties should give you some ammo. Weigel also makes the point that for all the claims of Biden being a showhorse, after his 1988 presidential campaign flamed out, he "recovered from his plagiarism scandal by burying all presidential ambitions for a generation and burrowing into his Senate work. He wasn't a foreign policy expert, so he became one." He's a plugger, and a conscientious one, which is similar to what Mark Schmitt says today as he remembers working with Biden -- and learning to respect him -- during the construction of the Crime Bill.
