Word has it that Vice President Joe Biden will not be speaking in convention prime time. It turns out that the VP has been relegated to the 9 o’clock hour and that two of the three major networks won’t be covering his speech.
I wonder why?
I mean, speaking at the convention during prime time is a “Big f-ng deal!”
Seriously, even Sandra Fluke, she of “I just can’t get enough free contraceptives from my Catholic university that doesn’t believe in premarital sex”, got a prime time gig last night.
Perhaps they think Uncle Joe is going to say something like “It’s great to be in Virginia!”
More than likely, he’s being relegated because the administration loves him so much.
From Bob Woodward’s latest expose “The Price of Politics”, as reported by Rick Klein of Time Magazine:
Vice President Joe Biden was labeled the “McConnell whisperer” by White House aides for his ability to cut deals with the often implacable Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The vice president led a parallel set of bipartisan talks that reached breakthroughs without the president’s direct involvement.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is depicted as more in touch with the Republican caucus that elected Boehner speaker, particularly with its strong contingent of tea party freshmen who came to Washington pledging to put the brakes on federal spending at any cost.
Cantor, Woodward writes, viewed Boehner as a “runaway horse” who needed reining in, given the realities of his own caucus. The Boehner-Obama talks started without Cantor’s knowledge, and Boehner later acknowledged to the president that Cantor was working against the very deal they were trying to reach, according to Woodward.
Intriguingly, Cantor and Biden frequently had “private asides” after larger meetings, according to Woodward. After one of them, Woodward writes that Biden told Cantor: “You know, if I were doing this, I’d do it totally different.”
“Well, if I were running the Republican conference, I’d do it totally different,” Cantor replied, according to Woodward.
One presumes that the “different” Biden and Cantor were talking about were still world’s apart. But it probably didn’t sit too well with the administration knowing Uncle Joe was still willing to deal – in a way the administration didn’t authorize.
