Joe Biden, right, and Barack Obama (Pixabay)
Joe Biden has been trying to embrace Barack Obama's record because he doesn't have one of his own, but the former vice president didn't fair well in what arguably was the 43rd president's biggest accomplishment, argues Dan McLaughlin in an analysis for National Review.
The best moment of Obama's presidency was the May 2011 raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. But it happened only because Obama ignored Biden when the vice president said, "Mr. President, my suggestion is, don't go."
"Biden is all too aware that he got the biggest decision of the Obama presidency wrong, which is why he changed his story years later to claim that he had actually supported the raid," McLaughlin writes.
That history is particulary significant on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks orchestrated by bin Laden, he notes, because Biden wants to become the next commander in chief.
McLaughlin says there are several reasons why Biden is embracing Obama's record rather than his own.
One is that most of his 47 years in Washington were spent as a legislator, not an executive, and his signature legislative measures are so unpopular with Democratic activists that he's had to renounce them.
Another is that the tasks Biden has handled as vice president -- from overseeing "shovel-ready" stimulus projects to dealing with Ukraine -- "are a morass of ineptitude, favoritism, and sleaze that Biden would rather avoid," McLaughlin says.
Killing Osama bin Laden was a big factor in Obama's re-election, and Biden turned it into a campaign slogan, "Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive!"
McLaughlin notes the "uncomfortable truth for Obama" was that bin Laden never would have been found without controversial Bush policies opposed by Obama.
Bin Laden's personal courier, for example, was traced through intelligence from the interrogation of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and CIA "black site" detention centers. The "linchpin" of the investigation, Hassan Ghul, was intercepted at the Iraq-Iran border in 2004, which would not have happened without the Iraq War.
Ghul was subjected to some forms of coercive interrogation, and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad had been waterboarded.
McLaughlin said it wouldn't do for Obama and Biden to recount that history "so they instead played up the one part of the bin Laden raid that involved Obama personally: the decision to send the SEALs into Abbottabad to get him."
Obama's decision was feted as a "gutsy" call by one administration official after another.
Biden's advice against the bin Laden raid has been confirmed on the record by multiple senior Obama advisers. And Biden even admitted it himself, in a 2012 ABC News interview, when it was politically advantageous to emphasize the decisiveness of Obama.
But when Biden considered running for president in 2015, "he began reconsidering his recollection of what happened — as well as challenging accounts that Hillary Clinton had advised in favor of the raid," McLaughlin wrote.
Politico, on Oct. 20, 2015, reported Biden "said he remembered being in favor of the raid all along, but worried about saying so in front of the other people in the room if Obama ultimately decided against it, to avoid causing a problem for the president on such a major decision."
McLaughlin noted Biden is no longer eager to talk about the raid.
"It's a strong point for Trump, as two of the biggest successes of his presidency came in taking out ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Iranian general Qassem Soleimani," McLaughlin said.
"Today of all days, we should remember that when the time came for a 'gutsy call' to avenge the September 11 attacks, Joe Biden said 'Don’t go.'"
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