×
Mark Schmitt weighs in on the VP pick:
I don't know Biden and he doesn't know me, but I saw a lot of him during the two-year struggle to construct and pass the 1993 Crime Bill. Like many things associated with Biden, it was an open-ended, rambling process. I was on the staff of Sen. Bill Bradley, where I had been involved in crafting a successful amendment to set aside a few hundred million dollars for crime prevention programs and after-school activities. I found myself -- to my amazement -- wedged among dozens of staffers and members of Congress in the room where House and Senate committee members alone were supposed to resolve the differences between their two bills. In the chaos, I realized what Biden is: a plodder, but a passionate one. He's never the smartest guy in the room. His SAT's probably wouldn't beat Barack Obama's, Al Gore's, or John Kerry's. But, like FDR, he knows it. And so, he works. He learns.Read the rest here.
As I listened to Biden pontificate about constitutional law and theories of crime prevention, I slowly realized that he was not just a preening blowhard watching himself in an imaginary mirror. Rather, in a way that was at times reminiscent of the entirely self-taught Sen. Robert C. Byrd, Biden has worked hard to master these issues, and wants nothing more to persuade and share his passion for that learning. And so while it required a large commitment of time, a Biden speech defending, say, the Violence Against Women Act, was worth paying attention to, in a way that only a few other senators' speeches (Byrd and the late Paul Wellstone) have ever been.
He didn't have always have brilliant solutions -- just as he doesn't have brilliant, never-before-seen solutions on the foreign policy issues that he waited almost 30 years to take on as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. But the values are liberal and the conclusions are right. More importantly, when Biden holds a view, he justifies it not by instinct -- the much over-rated power of which George W. Bush boasts -- but by immersion in the various viewpoints and relevant facts. There is no better counterpoint to the era of contempt for the "reality-based community" than Biden's evident belief that knowledge and facts, piled up high and sorted through, can support our moral commitments, whether to human rights or women's rights.
--The Editors
