Some polls surprisingly find that Joe Biden is mounting a serious bid for president despite being a man who has unsuccessfully run for president in nearly every cycle since 1988.
The former vice president has been topping polls recently as he criss-crosses the country stumping for Democrats in the 2018 midterm primaries, according to The Hill newspaper.
At least one recent poll found Biden leading Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) 26 to 18 percent, the paper says.
While many Democrats are talking about the need for “fresh faces” in Democrat politics, Biden is bucking that trend as the 75-year-old’s longtime presence in the party continues to draw interest.
“A fresh face is important, but Democrats need three things: someone to win the White House, someone who can elevate the rest of the ticket and a candidate who understands and appreciates governance where this president has shown disdain for it,” the executive director of the New York Democratic Party, Basil Smikle, told The Hill. “Biden fits that bill.”
Some Republicans have even noted that Biden could be a threat to Donald Trump because Biden has a reputation as a shoot-from-the-lip, straight talker i a similar style as Trump.
In addition, Biden could push his many years of experience as a counter to Trump’s outsider status, Democrat strategists say.
But Biden’s age could be a sticking point. At 75, if Biden were to win election to the White House, he would be the oldest president in U.S. history by a long shot. When he was inaugurated at age 70, Trump became the oldest president, but Biden would exceed that by over seven years.
Despite the high profile the former VP is currently enjoying, he has a very poor record for presidential campaigns. His two other serious runs for the White House were disastrous and saw him struggle to get primary votes.
His first big push in 1988 died stillborn after he was hit with a series of plagiarism charges when both his campaign speeches and his college papers were found to have passages lifted in toto from other writers.
His second serious run in 2008 was also aborted early when he could not get enough votes to mount a serious threat to Barack Obama’s candidacy. But Biden has floated a run for the White House in every election but one since his aborted 1988 campaign. Usually he found little interest in his candidacy.
Then there is a developing scandal with his son and the billion-dollar deal the two of them made with the Chinese that might become a problem.
Biden’s possible third run for president comes on the heels of evidence that he and his son, Hunter Biden, struck a billion-dollar deal with the Chinese government in an arrangement author Peter Schweizer calls a corrupt attempt at influence peddling.
The Clinton Cash author discovered the hushed deal Biden and his son made bringing the VP’s son a $1.5 billion deal with a China-backed private equity firm which invested in a Chinese atomic energy company indicted for “nuclear power conspiracy against the United States.”
Schweizer found the deal shocking because of the appearance that the Chinese were buying influence inside the U.S. government. Then there was the FBI investigation into one of the companies in which the Biden’s helped the Chinese invest.
As the author explained, ” The FBI arrests and charges senior officials in this company with stealing nuclear secrets in the United States. Specifically, they’re trying to get access to something called the AP-1000 nuclear reactor that is very similar to the ones that we put on U.S. submarines. So again, you have the son of the vice president, a close aide to the secretary of state who are investing in a company that is trying to steal nuclear secrets in the United States. It’s a stunning story, and here’s the thing: none of this is required to be disclosed because they’ve figured out a way to get around these disclosure laws.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
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