{"id":14119,"date":"2014-01-07T09:25:22","date_gmt":"2014-01-07T14:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=14119"},"modified":"2014-01-07T12:54:02","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T17:54:02","slug":"biden-and-cuomo-in-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2014\/01\/07\/biden-and-cuomo-in-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Biden and Cuomo in 2016?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Vice<\/a>

Vice President Joe Biden needs a partner to get him back to the White House in 2016. Photo: US Government<\/p><\/div>\n

As\u00a0 Vice President Joe Biden and Governor Andrew Cuomo meet in Albany this morning to talk infrastructure, political junkies like myself can’t help but wonder about side conversations.<\/p>\n

Most observers – including myself – think that both of these men would very much like to find a path to the White House in 2016.<\/p>\n

Both face a huge obstacle in the form of former New York Senator, former Secretary of State and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.<\/p>\n

Is there a ticket that could give either a shot at the Democratic nomination?\u00a0 A chance to derail the Clinton Juggernaut.<\/p>\n

Granted, it’s sort of like a game of Fantasy Baseball at this point — complete hokum, in other words — but surely one plausible team would be Biden-Cuomo.<\/p>\n

Biden has obvious national name recognition and heft throughout the Democratic Party apparatus, not to mention access to Barack Obama’s coast-to-coast network of donors and activists.<\/p>\n

He also holds a plausible claim to being “next in line” and that’s a strong tradition in American politics.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, if Cuomo were to help him capture New York’s prized delegates, and made a strong play for delegates from neighboring states such as New Jersey and Pennsylvania, it might sharply compromise Clinton’s path to the nomination.<\/p>\n

The bottom line is that if someone plans to seriously challenge Clinton, they’ll have to put together some kind of political alchemy like this.<\/p>\n

Remember that Barack Obama did just this in 2008, using strategic maneuvering to steadily erode Hillary Clinton’s mantle as the heir apparent.\u00a0 Can that work again?<\/p>\n

It would be a brutally tough fight.\u00a0 And Cuomo has experience being on the wrong side of history.\u00a0 In 2002, he mounted a challenge to Democratic gubernatorial candidate H. Carl McCall.\u00a0 That was a serious misstep in an otherwise carefully orchestrated career.<\/p>\n

It’s also an open question whether Cuomo would want to be in the middle of a dust-up with the Clintons.<\/p>\n

He served in Bill Clinton’s administration and such a match-up would pit two of the nation’s Democratic dynasties against one-another.<\/p>\n

On the other side of this calculation is the fact that if Hillary Clinton wins the White House and holds it for two terms, an ambitious guy like Cuomo would have to wait on the sidelines until 2024.\u00a0 He’d be 67 years old.<\/p>\n

So let me nod again to the fact that this is all a bit of horse-race handicapping.\u00a0 We’re in the shallow end of the political pool here.\u00a0 But as those two men sit down in the Red Room in Albany, I bet I’m not the only one watching the body language.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As\u00a0 Vice President Joe Biden and Governor Andrew Cuomo meet in Albany this morning to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14119"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14119"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14122,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14119\/revisions\/14122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}