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AUGUST 6, 2020 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
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hen it comes to politics, it’s very easy to make predictions. If your prediction is eventually proven correct, you puff your chest and remind everyone that you made the prediction. On the other hand, if your prediction doesn’t pan out, it doesn’t matter because by that time everyone probably already forgot what your prediction was anyway. It is for the latter reason that it may not be wise to predict who Joe Biden will pick as his running mate. After all, by the time you read this, he may have made his choice, and this article may already have a snug position in the trash can of foolish political articles. But what do I have to lose? In an era when politics is so vile and toxic, it’s almost a reprieve to play the guessing game. So here goes. Firstly, non-black/non-females need not apply. Sounds harsh? I’m not the one who proclaimed that Biden needs to pick a black woman as his running mate. This is not a meritocracy. It’s a colorocracy and a genderocracy. Sorry Elizabeth Warren – instead of announcing that you are a Native American, you should have said that you are black. Oh, and sorry Cory Booker – you don’t look that good in a skirt. So let’s consider the candidates who meet the “qualifications.” Barack Obama’s pick is his for-
mer National Security Advisor Susan Rice. Why are we talking about Obama’s pick if Joe Biden is the nominee? Because a prevailing belief is that, back in February, it was Obama who cleared out all the Democratic candidates and basically handed the nomination to Biden. The second part of that theory is that Obama is not silly enough to give control of the Democratic Party to bumbling Joe and that the arrangement was that Obama would control the presidency through the various officials placed around President In Name Only Biden, starting with the VP, who would really call the shots in the White Hose. Susan Rice, who is a consummate Washington insider, has been Obama’s rottweiler for a long time. She was the one who repeatedly lied about Benghazi, and she is believed to be the one who unmasked General Michael Flynn, in order to entrap him. She was also one of the architects of the Russian hoax and is still claiming that Trump is Putin’s asset. All of these actions were done on behalf of Obama and demonstrate her deep loyalty to him. On the other hand, if she is picked as the VP, Trump is going to have a field day dusting off the “drain the swamp” argument. He will hammer her until the cows come home for her proven lies. She would respond, “Russia…Russia…Russia.” The problem with that response is that it’s not a losing fight for the Democrats; they
already lost it. They would be better off focusing on the present corona and economic situation than going back to that “Russia hoax.” Additionally, although Susan Rice is seen as a foreign policy buff, Trump will hammer her for supporting the Iraq War (that is a drumbeat that will continue to work for the next hundred years). So picking Rice is very risky. The only question is whether Obama is willing to pull the trigger anyway. If they are confident that Biden has a safe lead and is definitely going to win in November, they will put her in. But if they are smart enough to realize that this thing is far from over and that Trump is more popular today than he was when he “came down the escalator” in 2016, they won’t pull the trigger on Rice. And, they are smart enough, so they will not ultimately choose her as VP. Since she is the only real Obama loyalist in the mix (Michelle is obviously more interested in becoming a billionaire than being stuck at the Naval Observatory for the next four years), once Rice is out, the decision becomes more traditional and one that the Biden team will likely make (sorry Obama…when Biden ran his mouth off and said that he will pick a black woman, he basically eliminated a lot of your people). So who is the Biden team considering?
There has been a lot of chatter about California Senator Kamala Harris. In fact, she is considered by many to be the frontrunner for the job. Chatter about her hit a frenzy when an AP reporter at Biden’s press conference (the only one he has conducted in the past four months) was able to zoom in on a card that Biden was holding. The card said “Kamala Harris,” under which there were three bullets as to why she is the right choice to be the vice-presidential nominee. Of course, the media tied themselves in knots and spent three days talking about the journalistic heist – getting a picture of the card. As usual though, they were played. That was a classically orchestrated “hot mic” type of trick, where a politician says something quietly – pretending that he doesn’t want anyone to hear – and it’s played incessantly for days once it’s picked up on a mic, because that is exactly what the politicians intended to happen. Obviously, with Biden’s cognitive decline, his hot mic moment had to be done in a way which he wouldn’t mess up, so there was a piece of paper conspicuously held so that the media could see what was written on it. Why did the Biden team want the media to see that? Well, here’s what else was written on the paper: that Biden is going to “rebuild the middle class…take responsibility…restore soul…tell the truth…” The media was a willing partici-
