Vice President Joe Biden

Yesterday, as many of you know (because it was reported frequently in the news), was the day that Marty McFly zoomed into our future on his souped up DeLorean. It was also the day that Joe Biden finally announced that he will not be running for President in 2015.

Honestly, I think this is a good thing. Joe’s time has come and gone. Now is not the time to run again.

Biden is a good guy, but he doesn’t have much too offer that isn’t already being offered by Hillary. Certainly Joe has plenty of experience in government. He spent 36 years in the Senate and while there ran for President twice. His first run was aborted by allegations of plagiarism[1] — in September of 1987, Biden was accused of plagiarizing a speech that had been made earlier that year by Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labour Party – and the second time he had the misfortune, like Hillary Clinton, of running against a Wunderkind politician named Barack Obama. (I wonder whatever happened to that guy.)

In end effect, Biden has a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses as Hillary. He has a lot of experience, his positions are by and large pretty reasonable, and he also has some character issues that beg the question of whether he’s trustworthy. He now has the added burden that he is still mourning the tragic loss of his son, Beau Biden, an up and comer who could very possibly have been a strong candidate for President himself in the next decade or two if brain cancer hadn’t cruelly cut him down.

(As an aside, I fucking hate cancer. But I digress.)

Joe, as he has already proven, would make an excellent Vice President. Maybe he should check whether Hillary wants to keep him on.

[1] This wasn’t the first time that Biden was accused of plagiarism. According to Wikipedia, while at Syracuse University College of Law, where Biden got his J.D., he was accused of having plagiarized 5 of 15 pages of a law review article. Biden said it was inadvertent due to his not knowing the proper rules of citation, and he was permitted to retake the course after receiving an “F” grade, which was subsequently dropped from his record.