It’s far from certain that Democratic primary voters in states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina will be clamoring for a Biden presidency in early 2008.

 

Yet it’s easy to picture Sen. Joe Biden getting applause at the debates from Democratic primary voters with comments like this:

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said yesterday that he believes top officials in the Bush administration have privately concluded they have lost Iraq and are simply trying to postpone disaster so the next president will "be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof," in a chaotic withdrawal reminiscent of Vietnam.

"I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost," Biden said. "They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy — literally, not figuratively."

In fact, it's easy to imagine this line being adopted by every Democratic contender, the inverse of Kerry's pledge that he had a secret plan to improve the situation in Iraq: the claim that the Bush administration has a secret plan to lose the war in Iraq. But this line constitutes a near-perfect excuse for a candidate's lack of a specific or viable plan for Iraq — "The guys who made the decision to start the war don't think this war is winnable, so why do you expect me to have a plan to win it? Everybody agrees this can only end with us fleeing in defeat like in Vietnam; the difference is I'm honest about it."

 

On a related note, as we gear up for wall-to-wall Democratic Primary coverage around here, I'm thinking of installing a Joe Biden Facetious Meter, counting the number of times he insists, really, that he is not being facetious. (Early research occurred here.) Perhaps a worthwhile hunt through the archives would determine if there has ever been an occurrence when the Delaware senator admitted that, indeed, he was being facetious.