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Hillary Clinton is considering asking Joe Biden to become her secretary of state if she wins the presidential election, Politico reports:
“He’d be great, and they are spending a lot of time figuring out the best way to try to persuade him to do it if she wins,” said the source familiar with the transition planning.
Is this a real thing, or just a stunt to get Democrats excited to vote? I don’t know! But this is funny:
Neither Clinton, nor her aides have yet told Biden. According to the source, they’re strategizing about how to make the approach to the vice president.
I guess they decided on “leak it to Politico,” which is actually also how a lot of kids get asked to prom.
Biden is a past chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who touted his foreign-policy chops, as they say, while running for president in 2008; his experience in that area was seen as one of the main reasons Barack Obama picked him as a running mate. (Biden was chosen over, among others, Hillary Clinton, who Obama of course then tapped to run his Department of State and Private Email.)
A recent Atlantic story features some good nuggets about Biden’s disagreements with other Obama administration figures on international issues. In a section about Biden opposing intervention in Libya, which Clinton advocated for:
Biden, who is acerbic about Clinton’s foreign-policy judgment, has said privately, “Hillary just wants to be Golda Meir.”
(I think this means “all she cares about is going down in history as a pioneeringly tough female leader,” FWIW. Incidentally, Biden also voted to authorize the Iraq war; you can read context on that vote here.)
On John Kerry’s push for more military aggression in Syria:
Administration officials have told me that Vice President Biden, too, has become frustrated with Kerry’s demands for action. He has said privately to the secretary of state, “John, remember Vietnam? Remember how that started?”
Secretary Uncle Joe has lines for everyone! Who wants some???
