Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. told the Angeles Times that he anticipated the victory of President-elect Donald J. Trump after he watched a Trump rally at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and witnessed the lack of enthusiasm for Hillary R. Clinton.
“Son of a gun. We may lose this election,” Biden said, recalling his thoughts for the paper during an interview.

The vice president said that Trump’s connection with the audience, forced him to remember one of his father’s adages: “I don’t expect the government to solve my problems. But I expect them to understand it.”
It is an familiar theme for Biden, who instructs his speechwriters to mention his audiences’ concerns in his speeches, whether he agrees with them or not. “I was trying to be as tactful as I could in making it clear that I thought we constantly made a mistake of not speaking to the fears, aspirations, concerns of middle class people.”

It was that tact the vice president was expected to take during his own aborted presidential campaign, where he intended to maintain the policy trajectory of President Barack Obama, tempered by a spirit of comity and respect for the people on the other side of the aisle — “a campaign of the heart.”

In fact, he told the Times, unlike the former first lady, who called Trump’s supporters “irredeemable” and “deplorables,” Biden defended Trump’s voters as regular Americans, like the ones he knew growing up


“They’re all the people I grew up with. They’re their kids. And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist. But we didn’t talk to them,” he said. “I believe that we were not letting an awful lot of people — high school-educated, mostly Caucasian, but also people of color — know that we understood their problems.”



There is a current of elitism running through the Democratic Party that offends regular people, who might not buy into the progressive agenda for their own reasons, he said. “In the meantime, you can’t eat equality, you know?”

The vice president, who made 83 campaign appearances for Clinton, said his misgivings were confirmed at a rally on the eve of Election Day with Clinton’s running mate Sen. Timothy Kaine (D-VA), when he said to his aides that he detected no excitement for the former secretary of state.


“You didn’t see any Hillary signs,” Biden recalled. “Every time I talked about Hillary they listened. But …”
Biden’s speech that night mirrors his message to Democrats now.

“God willing we’re going to win this, but there’s a lot of people who are going to vote for Donald Trump,” Biden told the crowd. “We’ve got to figure out why. What is eating at them? Some of it will be unacceptable. But some of it will be about hard truths about our country and about our economy. A lot of people do feel left out.”

After Jan. 20, Biden becomes a private citizen for the first time since he entered the Senate Jan. 3, 1973 — an institution he never left, because the vice president is the head of the upper chamber — but he told the paper he does not intend to leave the stage completely. His wife, Dr. Jill Biden, expects to continue teaching at Northern Virginia Community College, and the Bidens are looking for a home in the Virginia suburbs of the District of Columbia.

bogarde73 wrote on Dec 25^th, 2016 at 2:21pm:



Borrowed from another site ....

I have heard many out there, from pundits to the average Joe asking "Why We Lost". I have heard this from Democrats of all parts of the spectrum as well as many so called Republicans, so I will effort to answer this question.

I have heard all kinds of explanations, from misreading polling data, to angry white men, and they're all wrong. The question now is where to begin. There are a plethora of places to start so lets begin with the Democratic Party.

First lets dispel a little misconception, it is the Democratic party that supported slavery, while the republicans supported civil rights, the Democratic party supported segregation, it was a Democrat Colonel that started the KKK as a Military wing of the Democratic party in the south, targeting not just any random black individual but aspiring black political figures and the Republicans that supported them,this is Historical fact, not supposition, look it up in any history book. What does this have to do with today? The secret to understanding this question is understanding the Democrat party never abandoned slavery, they merely molded it into a 21 century version based on economics instead of race, you see the economics based slavery is so much less messy than slavery based on race, creed or sex. This is where it gets messy, because many of what we call "establishment" Republicans have followed the lead of their left side counterparts and joined the ranks of what are now called the "elites".

Maybe, but Joe Biden probably understands the Democrats and it's history better than Hillary



Biden had no illusions about what Hillary was up against

bogarde73 wrote on Dec 25^th, 2016 at 4:49am: