First on CNN: Biden meets with Warren in Washington

Washington (CNN)Vice President Joe Biden met privately with Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Saturday in his residence at the Naval Observatory, CNN has learned, another sign he is seriously deciding whether to jump into the Democratic presidential race.

The meeting between Biden and Warren, confirmed by two people familiar with the session, is the biggest indication yet that Biden is feeling out influential Democrats before announcing his intentions.

Beloved by liberal Democrats, Warren decided to sit out a campaign of her own, but she has yet to formally endorse a candidate. In an interview on Friday, she told WBZ in Boston: "I don't think anyone has been anointed."

The vice president arrived in Washington shortly before lunchtime, even though his official schedule said he was planning to spend the weekend at his home in Delaware.

Kendra Barkoff, a Biden spokeswoman, declined to comment on the meeting. But an aide to Biden confirmed a meeting, telling CNN: "The vice president traveled last minute to Washington, D.C. for a private meeting and will be returning to Delaware."

Biden is increasingly weighing whether to challenge Hillary Clinton and other Democratic candidates for the party's presidential nomination. A small team of advisers has spent weeks quietly putting together a campaign strategy and fundraising plan in case Biden decides to run. He had at least one meeting with them this week in Wilmington, one person familiar with the session told CNN.

He has told his associates he intends to make his decision in the next month, an announcement that could upend the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination.

With the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary six months away, Biden is the leading figure Democrats believe they could turn to if they needed to find an alternative to Clinton, whose favorability ratings have taken a deep hit as her email use while secretary of state is drawing deeper controversy.

Biden, 72, has a large and loyal collection of friends and advisers from more than four decades in Washington. Yet even inside his sprawling constellation, affectionately known as "Biden World," deep divisions exist over the wisdom of him making another bid for the presidency.

Via: CNN

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As Biden weighs a 2016 campaign, does he want to be the anti-Clinton?

By many accounts, Vice President Biden has spent his vacation week mulling whether to run for president — again. The decision will test head and heart and involve no small amount of emotion.

Tracking the story of is-he-or-isn’t-he-going-to-run is akin to chasing smoke, even to those who are loyal friends. Few people beyond his family are privy to his real thinking. Some Democrats say his advisers are making calls. Everyone looks for evidence of active pursuit of a campaign. Friends say they don’t yet sense a real campaign-in-the-making, and they doubt there ever will be. But they hedge.

Joe Biden has run for president twice without success, but almost three decades after his first campaign, the embers of ambition continue to glow. There was a time a few years ago when he might have willingly set aside those personal ambitions, if only because he could believe that his son Beau, a talented politician in his own right, would one day run for and perhaps be elected president.

Beau Biden’s tragic death a few months ago robbed the vice president of that hope. It is now left to the father to decide whether to do what his son reportedly urged him to do — to run once more. The death of Beau Biden also has prolonged the decision-making process about another campaign. It’s understandable that the vice president has not yet said “no” to a campaign in 2016. He is being tugged in different directions.

Biden can find reasons to think he should run. He is an accomplished public servant. He is a politician with 36 years of experience in the Senate. He served as chairman of both the Foreign Relations and Judiciary committees. He has been one of the most active vice presidents in history.

As he looks at Hillary Rodham Clinton, is there any doubt that he wonders why so many Democrats have tried to smooth her path to the nomination while seeming to ignore him? Does she have longer experience, more authenticity, a firmer connection to the middle class? He has long been an advocate for the struggling middle class, and unlike Clinton, he has not become fabulously wealthy.

Via: Washington Post

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[VIDEO] Chris Matthews still gets a thrill out of the president

It has been seven years since President Obama first thrilled MSNBC's Chris Matthews — and it looks like the thrill is not gone.

"I'm a political romantic, as many of you know now, I love stories of the Kennedys and Franklin Roosevelt," Matthews said this week.

The MSNBC host's remarks came during a larger discussion with panel guests on the friendship between Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. Matthews and his guests also touched on the recent death of the vice president's son, Beau, who died in late May of brain cancer.

"Winston Churchill and Charles deGaulle and yes, I got a thrill from the early speeches of Barack Obama. But nothing in that was as human as what we witnessed this weekend [at the vice president's son's funeral]," he said.

Since 2008, Matthews has battled constant mockery over his claiming once that a speech by Obama sent a "thrill" up his leg.

"I have to tell you, you know, it's part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech," he said during an evening newscast. "My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often."

Via: Washington Examiner

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From BFD To MIA: Joe Biden hides from Obamacare crisis

The president is facing his worst crisis of his five-year tenure. So where is the first mate of the Obama administration, good ol’ Joe Biden?

The vice president is in Houston, Texas, and he’s flying to Panama Nov. 20., far away from the crisis, from the president and from media questions about Obamacare.

He was home in Delaware on Nov. 17 after spending the previous three days in a New York, North Carolina and Georgia. On Nov. 13, he joined President Barack Obama for a closed-door White House meeting with advocates of greater immigration.

He met with military commanders on Nov. 12, spent the weekend of Nov. 11 and 10 at home in Delaware, and met with veterans Nov. 9. He stumped for Terry McAuliffe Nov. 4, in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, warning voters that the GOP candidate was “extreme.”

He’s running for president in 2016, but running away from Obamacare in 2014.

The crisis is so bad that on Nov. 14, President Barack Obama defended himself by denying that he was stupid.

“I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity a week before the website opens if I thought that it wasn’t going to work,” told a roomful of TV cameras and reporters.

That’s a real political crisis. But that day, Biden was 600 miles from Obama’s podium.

Via: Daily Caller
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Alaska Dem Mark Begich, 14 Others Up In 2014, Give Obama An Earful At WH Meeting

President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and other senior administration officials met privately Wednesday with frustrated Senate Democrats facing reelection in 2014 to discuss the botched Obamacare rollout.

 

The two hour meeting comes as the Obama administration and congressional Democrats work to assess the political fallout from the health care overhaul’s troubled implementation. Lawmakers passed on the frustration expressed by their constituents and the White House walked through their steps to repair the program.

“The American people are frustrated with the White House’s botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act, and I am too,” said Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor, one of the chamber’s most vulnerable Democrats. “In today’s meeting, I told the President and Vice President three things: 1) fix the website immediately 2) address the problems with the law and 3) hold the individuals in charge accountable for these mistakes. I won’t let up until these problems are fixed.”

“It was a real policy-heavy meeting,” a Democratic aide said. “The White House chose this group because this is a group that’s going to be ultra-sensitive to their constituents’ frustrations. This needs to be fixed. We all want this to work.”

The members at the meeting were Pryor, Mark Begich of Alaska, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Chris Coons of Delaware, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Al Franken of Minnesota, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Mark Udall of Colorado, Tom Udall of New Mexico, Mark Warner of Virginia and Michael Bennet of Colorado, according to Senate aides and the White House.

Mark Udall said in a statement after the meeting that he wants consumers to have time to shop for a plan and enroll after the problems are repaired.

Via: Fox

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Lawmakers huddle as options dwindle for tackling fiscal crisis

President Obama and congressional leaders were facing a rapidly shrinking set of options for averting the fiscal crisis as they met Friday afternoon, with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell warning they are "running out of time." 

Just a few weeks ago, lawmakers had high hopes for a "grand bargain" that would narrow the deficit, overhaul the tax code and set the country on a course to curb its entitlement spending -- all while averting massive tax hikes and spending cuts set to hit Jan. 1. 

Having squandered that time, lawmakers -- and taxpayers -- will now be lucky if they can just avert the tax hikes.

Obama and the top four congressional leaders were meeting Friday afternoon at the White House, along with Vice President Biden and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. At the meeting, Obama was expected to pitch a "Plan C" that's essentially a version of the scaled-back proposal he floated a week ago before leaving for Hawaii. 

Under the proposal, lawmakers would extend the current tax rates for the "middle class." What income level defines middle class remains up for debate -- Obama had previously pushed for tax hikes on families making over $250,000 and later upped that threshold to $400,000. House Speaker John Boehner, in a proposal that died in the House last week, called for tax hikes only on those making over $1 million. 

Beyond the tax rate issue, Obama wants to extend long-term jobless benefits for 2 million people set to lose them at the end of the year, and perhaps agree to some spending cuts that could short-circuit the automatic spending cuts scheduled to hit the Pentagon next month. 

Via: Fox News

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Report: Biden Pressured Bloomberg To Endorse Obama, “Mike, There’s Too Much At Stake. We Really Need You To Do This”…

AP Photo

POLITICO's Mike Allen reports that it was Vice President Biden who nudged New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg into endorsing President Obama.

From Playbook:

Biden’s gift for reading people played a role in the endorsement. He and Bloomberg have been friendly for years, and have played golf together. The V.P. had called the mayor over the weekend, and the had talked several times this week about Sandy. Then yesterday morning, Biden was in Davenport, Iowa, about to go to church for All Saints’ Day. Finally, he made the ask, nudging Bloomberg toward the endorsement: “Mike, there’s too much at stake. We really need you to do this.” And the mayor did.

Bloomberg went on to endorse Obama in an op-ed at the news outlet that bears his name — citing Obama's positions on climate change, abortion, and gay marriage.

Via: Politico

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[VIDEO]Former VP Aide Writes Angry Tell-All, Trashes 'Financially Illiterate' Obama-Biden

Adding another wild-card to the 2012 campaign’s final days, a former aide to Vice President Joe Biden has written a tell-all Washington memoir in which he lacerates the former Delaware senator as an “egomaniacal autocrat” who was “determined to manage his staff through fear.”

The book is hardly an objective study of the vice president, however. Author Jeff Connaughton, a Biden Senate staffer turned lobbyist, is by his own admission deeply disillusioned with the capital and embittered about his experience with the man who inspired him to enter politics.

Connaughton wrote “The Payoff,” which came out last month, in the fashion of guilt-racked whistle-blower: he was a party to a corrupt system and now wants to blow the lid off the game.

(Also on POLITICO: Mitt borrows Obama campaign themes)

“I came to D.C. a Democrat and left a plutocrat,” he confesses.

As chief of staff to former Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), Biden’s successor, Connaughton was radicalized by his unsuccessful experience trying to get an amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill that would have broken up the country’s largest banks. So he left Washington politics and wrote what he believes is the unvarnished truth about the country’s political system. The big reveal: Big banks control both parties.

“It’s time people understand why – and how – Wall Street always wins,” Connaughton writes at the outset of his book.

(Also on POLITICO: Voter tells Biden he's a 'good guy' but bad VP)

He is harshly critical of his own party and the Obama administration, arguing that the president is no different than most other Washington Democrats in his willingness to kowtow to Wall Street.

President Obama and Biden, he writes, are “both financially illiterate.”

“The Payoff” is every bit the cri de coeur of a man who, as he writes, is “willing to burn every bridge” in order to indict the transactional Washington lobbying and political culture. (After Kaufman’s term ended, Connaughton fled D.C. and moved to Savannah, Ga.)

Via:  Politico

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RUPERT MURDOCH PREDICTS ‘NIGHTMARE FOR ISRAEL IF OBAMA WINS,‘ ACCUSES WHITE HOUSE OF ’STILL LYING ABOUT BENGHAZI’

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch went on a bit of a Twitter tear Saturday morning, predicting a “nightmare for Israel if Obama wins” re-election and accusing the White House of “still lying about Benghazi.”

The media mogul — whose company owns Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and others — said Vice President Joe Biden “threw [the] CIA under the bus“ and ”now [White House] throws State [Department]!” He also came down on Mitt Romney, saying the Republican presidential nominee needs to ignore personal attacks at the next debate and focus on his jobs plan:

Image source: Twitter

Image source: Twitter

Image source: Twitter

Murdoch has been fairly free with his Twitter advice for Romney in the past: Last month he said he needed to “stop fearing [the] far right” and take more of a big tent approach to win the election. During the summer, he wondered, “when is Romney going to look like a challenger?” He subsequently defended himself from an apparent barrage of negative tweets from Romney supporters, saying, “of course I want him to win, save us from socialism, etc.”

As Mediaite noted, when a Murdoch-type figure in the media espouses such clear-cut political beliefs so publicly, “the question arises as to whether these opinions will eventually trickle down through their outlets.”

Via: The Blaze

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The Joke's On Joe

 By PATRICK GAVIN | 10/11/12 9:56 PM EDT Updated: 10/11/12 9:58 PM EDT

Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan were the two candidates on stage at Thursday’s vice presidential debate but a third character emerged: Joe Biden’s laugh, which didn’t escape the notice of tweeting politicos.

Weekly Standard’s Mark Hemingway: “Joe Biden’s laughing through talking about Iran sanctions?”

TIME’s Michael Scherer: “Not sure debate cameras have been light tested for Biden’s teeth. Best to watch with sunglasses.”

Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein: “Biden’s strategy seems to be to laugh at Ryan constantly. Will it work to infantalize Ryan, or backfire like Gore sighing?”

Via: Fox News

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Biden Dares ‘Fact Check Me’, Romney Campaign Obliges

Vice President Biden is doubling down on watchdog groups and others  who are saying he made misleading remarks in a speech earlier this week regarding the Romney-Ryan rescue plan for Medicare – daring reporters to “fact check me.”

Biden put down the challenge during a speech Saturday, after saying as he did during his acceptance speech Thursday at the Democratic National Convention that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and running mate Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan would cut benefits immediately for 30 million seniors already collecting Medicare.

 “I say to the press, fact check me,” a smiling Biden said to applause at a rally in Zanesville, Ohio,

The Romney Campaign took up the challenge within hours.

“Today, Vice President Biden said that he should be fact checked, and we agree,” said Romney campaign spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg. “The vice president knowingly and deliberately leveled false and discredited attacks. This is further proof that the Obama Campaign is unable and unwilling to talk honestly or substantively about the most important issues driving the country."

"In an attempt to distract from President Obama’s failed record, including unemployment remaining over 8 percent, labor force participation falling to three-decade lows, and our national debt passing $16 trillion, Vice President Biden is once again advancing fabricated and disproven attacks on Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan," Henneberg added.

Biden's comment follows Romney pollster Neil Newhouse saying in late August, "We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

The Romney campaign also on Saturday released a statement with fact-checks on statements Biden made relating to Romney's tax and Medicare plans, and claims from Biden that Romney shipped jobs overseas.

Via: Fox News

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Fact-checkers find exaggerations in Obama, Biden conventions speeches

President Obama and Vice President Biden made statements in their convention speeches about unemployment, Medicare and other issues that fact-checkers say appear inaccurate or at least misleading.

Among the questionable remarks were Biden's argument that "after the worst job loss since the Great Depression we created 4.5 million private sector jobs in the past 29 months" – a frequent response by the Obama campaign when questioned about the slow economic recovery.

The Associated Press and others point out that statement is misleading because it counts jobs from the recession's lowest point  to where employment began to grow again – excluding jobs lost earlier in Obama's term and masking that overall unemployment has increased over that period.

"Overall, roughly 7.5 million jobs were lost during the recession that began in December 2007 and ended officially in June 2009," according to the wire service.

The Associated Press also points out that Obama said in his speech that he wants to use money saved by ending the wars to build highways, schools and bridges.

However, the wars were largely financed by borrowing "so there is no ready pile of cash to be diverted to anything else," the wire service writes.

The group FactCheck.org listed eight instances in which either Biden or Obama "spun" facts during their speeches Thursday night in Charlotte, N.C.

Via: Fox News

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Beyond Isaac, Dems also looking to rain on Republicans' party

Tropical Storm Isaac isn't the only force threatening to rain on the Republican National Convention next week. 

Democrats are planning to break from the tradition of keeping a low profile during the rival party’s convention, dispatching Vice President Biden to the host city and putting other A-list surrogates on the campaign trail to perhaps steal some of the spotlight.

Biden will not, however, be in Tampa for opening day, as inclement weather has forced the vice president to postpone his trip. He will be joined in Orlando by Hollywood actress and Obama for America co-chairwoman Eva Longoria, who is also expected to speak at the Democratic National Convention the following week in Charlotte, N.C.

Meanwhile, President Obama has scheduled campaign stops Tuesday and Wednesday in the battleground states of Ohio, Colorado and Virginia.

And first lady Michelle Obama is scheduled to appear on “The Late Show with David Letterman” on Wednesday, hours after GOP vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is expected to deliver his speech.

The move marks a concerted effort to make sure the Democratic message is not drowned out, not even for a week, in what is shaping up to be a tightening presidential race.  

“Decorum has broken down,” said Christopher Arterton, former dean of the George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management. “It’s accepted practice now. We may well see each party make news during the other’s convention.”

Arterton points out that Obama being president makes whatever he says newsworthy. “So it’s easier to intrude,” particularly after a news event “like a hurricane, just suppose,” he said.

Arterton also said convention week is great for rival-party fundraising because campaigns can get donors together to “yell at the TV” while the other convention is being broadcast.

Via: Fox News

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