Why Joe Biden Doesn't Do Press Conferences

Following up on my earlier post on the relative sparseness of Joe Biden's availability to the media and Tommy's highlighting of the incredible, insane, asinine stupidity of his comments today. It's not the content of what Biden said, it's that he said out loud. This is classic Joe Biden: telling the unfortunate truth. He can't help it.

Read Tommy's post, but here's the salient quote:

"Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

This is of course, the absolute truth. It's what will happen. The question is, why did Joe choose to talk about a. Foreign Policy at all and b. In such a way that it heightens the nation's worst fears about Obama.

RedState:

My own worries are slightly different. We can probably survive losing a diplomatic confrontation with Iran (unless they decide to do something stupid, like try to nuke Israel: then we won't have to lose it): and our response to an invasion of South Korea by North Korea will at least have the virtue of simplicity. But if China decides to force a confrontation over Taiwan... well, if Obama wins then I recommend that the Taiwanese that aren't ready to make nice with the PRC start acquiring passports ahead of time. Likewise, if the Pakistanis conclude that now is a good time to push India over Kashmir, sorry, guys: we had a change in administrations, and the new one isn't particularly interested in maintaining good relationships with the world's largest democracy. Then there's the dark horse of Venezuela: I suspect that Chavez would dearly love to push around Uncle Sam a bit, and the potential there for a blindsiding of a hypothetical Obama administration is just too great to ignore.

Darke Blog:

These are Biden's words here, not mine. Elect Barack Obama and within six months we'll have an international crisis. By contrast, apparently, the world will not test the seasoned and ready John McCain. Yep - I'm thinking that I agree with Biden on this one.

The McCain blog focuses on Biden's statement "it won't be apparent that we're right:

The worst of it: Biden assumes that Obama's response to whatever crisis their administration provokes will not be perceived by the American people as the correct response. "It's not gonna be apparent that we're right," he said.

It would be one thing if Barack Obama had, like John McCain, spent years pushing a foreign policy idea that was unpopular with the American people and dismissed by the media only to be extremely successful in the event--see the surge. But the opposite is true in the case of Barack Obama.

Barack Obama opposed the surge and said it would increase violence. That was wrong. When Russia invaded Georgia, Obama called on Georgia to 'show restraint.' That was wrong. Barack Obama has called for sitting down with the world's worst tyrants without preconditions--it wasn't apparent that was 'right' even to Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, but Obama has stuck with that policy. What kind of international crisis might those meetings provoke when it becomes apparent that he was wrong again?

And of course what really ties this nicely together is Joe Biden's honesty when he didn't have to subvert it for the Obama campaign: