No margin for error

Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., was interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition on Wednesday.

The interview was unusual for Biden in that he actually seemed physically present rather than floating in the ethereal realm of meta-politics he usually makes his home. On the campaign trail or during his many appearances on cable and Sunday morning news shows, Biden tends to step back into a world of abstraction. Rather than telling the audience or the TV host what he actually thinks, he instead speaks abstractly of what Democrats ought to be saying publicly. It never seems to occur to him that: A) he is a Democrat; and B) he is, at that moment, speaking publicly.

There’s a bit of darkly comic finger-pointing toward the end of the interview, as NPR’s Steve Inskeep and Biden, respectively, blame the Congress and the press for naively and enthusiastically swallowing the Bush administration’s specious arguments for the invasion of Iraq.

They’re both right, of course, or both partly right — since both institutions failed miserably in the run-up to war, failing to do their jobs by demanding answers to the obvious questions they refused to ask at the time. This failure of Congress and the press to ask these questions was even more egregious since millions of others — workers, soccer moms, teachers, doctors, nurses, students and all sorts of other dirty effing hippies — were raising those very questions by taking to the streets in the largest public demonstrations the world has ever seen. Ignoring and dismissing those demonstrations was more than just a passive failure on the part of both Congress and the media. It was an active, deliberate act of irresponsibility.

But none of that is what I really wanted to get to from this interview. I want to highlight a comment Biden made at the very end:

When this president is constitutionally required to hand off power to the next president, he will leave the next president with virtually no margin for error.

This is, as Joe Biden would say, something that Democrats ought to be saying when they speak publicly.

For the first time since 1952, America has a presidential election without a sitting vice president as heir-apparent. (Dick Cheney would never stoop to seek lower office.) As a result, we have more than a dozen declared candidates seeking the Democratic and Republican nominations, with even more potential candidates waiting in the wings.

But consider the mess that George W. Bush is leaving behind him. The next president will face multiple full-blown crises. The war in Iraq has strained America’s Army almost to the breaking point, and there are no good options remaining. Bush’s fiscal policy has vastly expanded our national debt with hundreds of billions in annual deficits, but the largest effects of his tax-cuts are designed to kick in later, in 2008 and 2009. Those balloon payment tax cuts are much like the balloon payment mortgages forcing record numbers of American homeowners into foreclosure. Our budget deficits seem mild in comparison with America’s trade deficits, or the much harder-to-quantify prestige deficit, as America’s regard and reputation in the world has sunk to Antebellum levels. The next president will also be facing the bill, with interest, for eight years of dithering and deferred maintenance on everything from infrastructure to entitlements. Oh, and by the way, Greenland is getting greener and have you peeked at peak oil lately?

Cleaning up George W. Bush’s mess will not be easy. The next president will have to deal with several very difficult problems all at the same time and there will be, as Biden says, very little margin for error. I don’t imagine that everything that will need to be done will be popular, but I do think the people will understand and respect the necessity of it if the next president explains the gravity of the situation. That’s why I think it is important that the candidates running for president begin explaining this now. Making that case — explaining to the people that real and difficult problems will require real and difficult solutions — may not seem like the easiest way to run for office, but it is the only way to campaign if a candidate hopes to be able to actually do the job once he or she is elected.

As for Biden himself, I’m not impressed with his track record. His active support for the bankruptcy bill demonstrated exactly the kind of political pandering that the next president will not be able to afford. That bill was driven by credit-card lenders who had oversaturated their market, exposing themselves to billions in dubious loans. Those lenders hoped that Congress would be able to magically bail them out, eliciting blood from stones by legislative fiat and enabling them to continue their pursuit of unending profit via the limitless growth of household debt. Like the business model it hoped to prop up, the bill simply didn’t make sense. But it passed, with Biden’s enthusiastic support.

The most charitable explanation of Biden’s vote on the bankruptcy bill would point to the importance of credit-card lenders in his home state of Delaware. At the time of the bill’s passage, MBNA was the largest private employer in the state. The Delaware delegation’s support for the bill could thus be seen as an expression of their support for their constituents (provided, of course, that you ignore the fact that far more of their constituents were MBNA’s debtors than were MBNA’s employees).

But if his support of this bill was meant to protect the jobs of his constituents, then it didn’t work. MBNA has since been taken over by Bank of America, with the ensuing layoffs meaning that it is no longer the largest private employer in Delaware. So even by the most charitable interpretation of it, Biden’s vote was a bad decision — the kind of bad decision that our next president, with “no margin for error,” will not be able to afford to make.

That and his other bad decision — his support of the AUMF that made possible bin Laden’s dream scenario of the quagmire of Iraq — disqualify Biden from getting my vote in next year’s primary.