Don't forget the big "peace dividend."
Bingo. Nobody believes that. Nobody believes that merely by ending a tragedy we are in good shape then in the Middle East or in good shape in the world. So it's much more sophisticated. So they are intuitively much more sophisticated.
[Biden turns to his pollster John Marttila and refers to a Marttila survey of 2,000 voters.] Correct me if I'm wrong now, but essentially [the voters] have my position. The country is "We want out, but you can't just leave. There are going to be consequences. What are you going to do about the consequences." So that's where I think the simplicity and the race of some of the candidates to capture what they perceive to be the left [is wrong]. I don't think it is the left. I don't think that's where the party is.
That's the reason why I think I'm going to win. I'll give you an example. One of my colleagues on the [Senate] Foreign Relations Committee, a good guy, was, in the early days of the surge, going to put in an amendment to put a cap on troops. I went to him and I said, "You don't want to do that." I knew why he wanted to do it, because MoveOn.org and, you know -- And so he introduced it and I said I'm going to debate you on it. I pointed out that it couldn't possibly work. He's capping [the troops] at an artificially high level. "Whoa," he said, "that's not what I mean to do."
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that every one of these things that these other guys -- I haven't had a chance to debate Bill Richardson yet, but Bill goes out and he makes a speech to a group that I am going to speak to. The Daily Kos thing. I am going to go to that.
I'm sure that Bill ... is going to go out and tell them, "I'm the only one who says remove troops."
Well, I am going to stand there and say, "Hey, guys, what's he going to do with the embassy personnel, the several thousand there?"
[And Richardson will say],"Well, we have to leave [soldiers] there to protect them."
[And I'll say] So how many troops is that?
[Richardson:] "Well, I don't know."
Well, I can tell you. Somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000. Are you all for that?
In other words, when you take people through this, they know that it is not a simple deal. And so I don't believe that this sort of red-meat, "I'll get out quicker than the other guy" [competition] has resonance. And I think it has a real danger.
Now when you take the extreme position -- I'm leaving, force is bad -- Dennis Kucinich, God love him, and Gravel, whose position is that war is never necessary or justified or whatever. Then what you do is you flip the Democratic nominee into the unenviable position that every Democratic nominee has had to face since John Kennedy.
That they're "not tough enough."
They're not tough enough. And the truth of the matter is that Democrats want somebody tough and smart. They want you smart enough to get you out of a war you know you shouldn't be in. But tough enough to do whatever you need to do to intelligently protect American security.
And you run the risk in a primary of appealing to the New Left, I'll call it, of the Democratic Party and putting the party nominee in the position he can't win a general election.
Do you think in the era of YouTube and video cellphones, you can get away with being Joe Biden? I mean being a guy who in the space of two minutes in Cedar Rapids started to tell a joke about Al Gore and the Internet and made a reference to George Wallace in a discussion of healthcare plans.
The answer is probably not. But I'll tell you what -- one of the things I'm not going to do. I'm not going to let that system alter who I am. For example, one of the things that happens is that the public is coming to grips with how to deal with this instant, unfiltered information that may be deliberately mis-edited.
But I think -- and this is naive maybe -- I have confidence that the American people will put this in perspective. Like when one of the bloggers said, "We're going to take back the Democratic Party."
They don't own the Democratic Party. What are they talking about? So, for example, my pointing out George Wallace from 1968 and quoting what he said, somebody could take that out of context and say "Biden quoted Wallace," making it sound like Biden is being favorable about Wallace.
At the end of the day, I think what happens is that people basically take a motion picture of their candidate and not a snapshot of their candidate. It's a little bit like the Barack comment. [Just as he was launching his presidential campaign in late January, Biden gave an interview in which he maladroitly referred to Obama as "articulate and bright and clean."]
Not a serious person in the press thought that I meant anything other than being complimentary. The good news is that I have a 34-year record on civil rights. Nobody, nobody could suggest that I was being prejudiced. But initially on the blogosphere, this was taken in a different context.
The answer is that there are two sides to my being straightforward and candid. And that is, I'm going to get myself in trouble. But the only thing I decided to do -- I can't start trying to calibrate all this stuff. I really believe that at the end of the day, the public in the primaries, as well as the general election, are going to judge me for all of who I am.
Let me squeeze in a money question, since you only raised $2.4 million in the second quarter. Is that because people aren't coming to your fundraisers, or you're not making the calls, or when you call people, instead of giving you $2,300, they write you a check for $500?
I think it is all of the above. But mostly what I think it is is that I have never focused on fundraising. We are in the process of trying to put together a first-rate fundraising operation. A lot of it has to do with organizational structure because where we go, people are responding. I realize that part of it is me, since I haven't from the outset made this a priority.
I haven't done anything political in 20 years. You know what I mean by that?
Easy Senate reelections, no need to raise a large amount of money until now?
I haven't gone out and put together a national fundraising organization. I haven't put together any of this stuff. And the other piece of it is that -- I may be wrong -- I continue to believe that the money is not going to be the difference.
It is what it is. I think it's Iowa and New Hampshire and we'll have enough money to compete there. I think we're going to do fine.
And if you don't, all the money in the world wouldn't have saved you?
I think that's true. I really do. I think this is more about two things. Very serious press people ... reaching a generic consensus that Biden -- not that he should or shouldn't be president -- but that Biden is qualified to be president. He's the real deal, he's qualified.
And the second piece of it is that I have to reintroduce myself to the public. One of the interesting polls -- I think it was the CBS poll -- is that a lot of people know who I am, but they don't know anything about me. They know about my positions, but they don't know anything about me.
Are you married? Divorced? People want to know those things to measure your character. And that to me is the second piece of this that I hope gets revealed. And people make judgments in the primaries about character. And we'll see whether I have the right character. I'm not beating my chest and saying, "My character -- "
As somebody said in one of our [campaign] meetings, people look at me and they kind of picture me as the guy beyond the podium who is the secretary of state and who went to Yale and comes from a wealthy family.
There's really no connection with my roots, who I am. And that will get unfolded along the way here. [Pause.] I hope.
About the writer
Walter Shapiro is Salon's Washington bureau chief. A complete listing of his articles is here.
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