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Some grumbles continued, but Biden shrugged it off. He had bigger fish to fry.

"If you watch the debates you'll find that all of my colleagues are always saying, 'Well, Joe's right,'" Biden said. He shook his head a bit at the gall of it. "They're willing to grant to me that I know more about foreign policy than they do. And they kid me. They all say, 'You know, Joe'd make a great Secretary of State.' Which is another way of saying I shouldn't be president."

Typically the first clue someone doesn't think you should be president is when they, you know, run against you.

AT A DEMOCRATIC SPIN breakfast in Las Vegas after the November CNN debate, one liberal pundit dreamily posited, "Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama must wake up every morning thanking their lucky stars Joe Biden doesn't have the money to run against them."

This line seems to have become Conventional Wisdom, although it's tough to understand watching Biden strut and preen his way through his stump speech with his quirky, not-altogether-unappealing mixture of wit, intelligence and hyper-self-regard.

Biden, for example, speaks at length with a touching passion about his experiences visiting with troops on the front lines in Iraq. Yet these moments always segue into tangents suggesting the worst unintended consequence of the war for Biden is how it's derailed his Nanny State legislative agenda.

"Everything I care about, everything I've devoted my life to -- everything -- is impeded by the continuation of this war," Biden lamented. "Iraq is like a big boulder sitting in the middle of the road."

More like in the middle of Joe Biden's political driveway. Once he ends the war, Biden promises the revenues saved will make universal healthcare and college with no debt possible, eviscerate the national debt and summon forth the renewable energy technology to end dependence on "oligarchs of oil."

Of course, Joe Biden was in Congress for 30 years before the Iraq invasion. Presumably he knows the nation wasn't stoking the Treasury Department furnaces with $500 bills just to make sure ol' Delaware Joe couldn't get credit for single-handedly saving the downtrodden masses. Once upon a time there was no Iraq war and we still didn't have the cash for Biden's platform.

Throughout his speech Biden decried "the moralizing of my Republican colleagues running for president," and then followed it up with rank simplistic moralizing of his own, preaching on about Republicans' "Orwellian prostitution of basic human rights" -- true, as part of a bipartisan consensus -- and typical liberal non-sequiturs such as, "I think the vast majority of the American people believe taking care of children is more important than a tax cut."

What? How did Biden get a peek at the Republican National Committee's Screw the Children 2008 strategy memo? Or is this simply one more of his unearthly insights?

DURING ONE OF BIDEN'S more esoteric interludes, the Senator asked the audience to imagine he'd been president on September 11, 2001 and then gave the speech he would have delivered to Congress in the aftermath of the attacks chock full of catchphrases about multilateralism and sacrifice. "What did the president say, as my mother would say, God love him?" Biden roared at the crowd. "He said fly and go to the mall."

Considering the epidemic of convenient political amnesia Biden and his Democratic colleagues have come down with during this election cycle, it's worth revisiting what Bush actually said before Congress on September 20, 2001, when he described the new war as "the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom," one in which America would "ask every nation to join us."

Bush asked citizens to "uphold the values of America," because "in a fight for our principles...our first responsibility is to live by them." And, yes, he urged "continued participation and confidence" in an American economy that had just taken a trillion dollar-plus hit.

This is not to absolve Bush of any errors of judgment in ensuing years, obviously, but the president did something quite a bit more substantial when he showed up at the Capitol than hand out maps to the nearest mall and spin some Toby Keith records.

topics:
Foreign Policy, Trade, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Environment, Law, Iraq, Israel, NATO, Africa, Energy, Oil