Grinding My Teeth
I really really want to like Joe Biden and this article in the Times almost gets me there:
But life in Scranton was not always so easy for Joe Jr., who was born there on Nov. 20, 1942, the first child to Joe Sr. and Catherine Eugenia Finnegan, known to all as Jean.
Joey was a popular kid, if a bit quick with a punch, especially if someone teased him about his stutter, which he struggled mightily to conquer.
While Mr. Biden has described his early youth as stable and relatively carefree, his father suffered a number of business reversals, and for several years when Joe Jr. was young the Bidens were forced to move in with his mother’s parents, the Finnegans, in their modest home on North Washington Avenue in Scranton.
Though Scranton was sharing in the postwar economic boom, Joe Sr. had trouble finding steady work, and nothing that measured up to his previous success. For a time, he commuted to Wilmington to clean boilers for a heating and cooling company. In 1953, he moved the family there….
Joe Jr. learned a number of lessons during his father’s lean years that he regularly cites in speeches and interviews. In his autobiography, he tells the story of his father quitting a job as sales manager for an auto dealership because the owner, who liked to reward his employees and customers with silver dollars, decided to amuse himself at the dealership’s Christmas party by spilling out a bucket of silver dollars on the dance floor to watch his workers scramble to scoop up the coins. Joe Sr. gathered up his wife and walked out, never to return.
He would stoop if he had to, to support his family, but not that low.
“That’s how you come to believe, to the very core of your being, that work is more than a paycheck,” Senator Biden said in his speech accepting the Democratic vice-presidential nomination. “It’s dignity. It’s respect.”
All of this makes me like Joe Biden. I know what it’s like not to have steady work, and I know what it’s like to take shitty jobs because you have others mouths to feed. And I like that Joe Biden Jr. grew up in a house where life wasn’t easy, because it gives him a real understanding of the issues working families face.
Given his background, I have one question, one that keeps me from thoroughly embracing the VP candidate: why did he vote foe to bankruptcy bill that hurt so many familes and has led to so many foreclosures.
I realize this is a question many of my readers don’t want me to raise. As Booman writes,
There are few things I don’t like about Obama and a few more things I don’t like about Joe Biden. Fortunately, they kind of cancel each other out. Biden has been wrong on bankruptcy law and the AUMF-Iraq. Obama was right. Obama was wrong on FISA. Biden was right. But, any way you slice it, we haven’t had a ticket this liberal since, what, 1984?
I don’t know that they cancel each other out. I do know one thing: someone needs to cancel out that Bankruptcy Bill and restore some kind of sanity and regulation to the credit card industry. THAT will be change I can believe in.
October 24th, 2008 at 8:44 am
Joe’s a good man. He’s not a prefect liberal, if there is any such thing, but he’s a good man. And there hasn’t been a good man in or near the White House in eight years.
October 24th, 2008 at 8:47 am
Well, this Obamaniac wants you to raise it. Why the fuck did Joe Biden visit the bankruptcy bill on the American people? That’s easy. Because as Senator, Joe Biden was firmly in the pocket of credit card companies, which were flush with cash during the easy-credit times.
Now Joe will be out of the Senate and out of the legislative process altogether and it will be up to the new Democratic Congress to do something about it.
Also, you need to [/blockquote]
October 24th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
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