Our authentic Vice President, and the very real problem of ‘knock-off jihadis’
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Though you won’t see this on any plaque in the new George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, there’s one baton our 43rd president passed not to our 44th but to Vice President Joe Biden, surely the most misunderestimated practitioner in American politics today.
Gaffes, Biden’s got ‘em – a natural bi-product of that thing we call ‘authenticity,’ really. But while we’re laughing it up, just as we did at the president now known as the Lucian Freud of Preston Hollow, we’re liable to undervalue the power of coming across like, yes, someone with whom you’d like to nurse a near-beer.
When the vice president told MIT officer Sean Collier’s grieving parents, “My heart goes out to you,” at a memorial here on Wednesday, it meant even more because Biden has one that he wears around in plain sight. And because he was changed by loss, too, with the long-ago death of his first wife and baby daughter, just as W. seems to have been by the death of his younger sister Robin.
Unlike Bush, however, Biden has not only heart for days, but a record of getting us out of jams rather than into them. His knowledge of and relationships in Washington helped get unemployment benefits extended in 2010. In 2011, he helped avert the debt ceiling crisis, and in 2012, the fiscal cliff.
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K & R 
