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Joe Biden and Influence Peddling

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With U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. Vice President Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping delivers remarks at a State Luncheon in the Chinese President’s honor at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on September 25, 2015. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]

Do you remember when Joe Biden first ran for president? It was 1988. Yes, more than three decades ago.

With the caveat that much can change between now and November 2020, Roger Kimball discusses why Joe Biden is an intermittent glimmer – an ignis fatuus

– over The Swamp that surprises everyone and then disappears.

I won’t rehearse the reasons that I think this other than to mention Biden’s age, his race, his worrisome foot-in-mouth disease, his probably innocent but eyebrow-raising hands-on-young-girls penchant. Then there is his son, Hunter. Peter Schweitzer gives us a good taste of what that’s all about: “In December of 2013, Hunter Biden flies on Air Force 2 to Beijing, China, with his father,” Schweizer said in a recent interview.

How Do You Spell Influence Peddling

His father meets with Chinese officials, he’s very soft on Beijing. The most important thing that happens [takes place] 10 days after they return. And that’s when Hunter Biden’s small, private equity firm called Rosemont Seneca Partners gets a $1 billion private equity deal with the Chinese government, not with the Chinese corporation, with the government. And what people need to realize is Hunter Biden has no background in China. He has no background in private equity. The deal he got in the Shanghai free-trade zone, nobody else had — Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Blackstone, nobody had this deal.

Nevertheless he (Biden) is surging in the polls. Why? Nostalgia, for one thing. There was dear ol’ Joe for 8 years of the Obama administration. Everybody knows his name. What exactly does he stand for? Don’t be rude. He is a nice man. Avuncular. Friendly, folksy, smiling Uncle Joe (and I don’t mean the Uncle Joe that Bernie Sanders admires).

But all that only takes us so far. The real reason that Joe Biden is the darling among the grown ups in the Democratic party is this: he is, or at least appears to be, sane. He is not an obvious fruitcake. He is not “woke.” (Indeed, it is not always clear that he is awake.)

We may not know exactly what he stands for—he’s stood for so many contradictory things over the years—but he is not an obvious anti-Semite, an avowed socialist, a convinced proponent of ending air travel for the sake of “the environment,” etc. He’s vaguely progressive, sure, and listeth as the wind bloweth. But he acts somewhat, and he certainly looks, like some Democrats of yore. Big government types who were nonetheless unashamedly pro-American. Would anyone accuse AOC of that? Or Bernie Sanders? Or Fauxcahontas?

Joe Biden is, or at least appears, normal. He is unthreatening. He likes it in the apple cart. It’s been awfully good to him and he doesn’t want to upset it.

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Debbie Young

Debbie, editor-in-chief of Richardcyoung.com, has been associate editor of Dick Young’s investment strategy reports for over three decades. When not in Key West, Debbie spends her free time researching and writing in and about Paris and Burgundy, France, cooking on her AGA Cooker, driving her Porsche Boxter S through Vermont and Maine, and practicing yoga.