Joe Biden may well be the most honest man in Washington. That's
a very good thing if you are a member of the political press
and, at the moment, not a very good thing if you are Hillary
Clinton.

Witness Biden's interview Monday night with CNN's Gloria Borger.
Borger asked the vice president to explain why Bernie Sanders
has found so much success in his challenge to Clinton for the
2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Here's how Biden
answered:

BIDEN: I think that -- that Bernie is speaking to a yearning
that is deep and real, and he has credibility on it. And that is
the absolute enormous concentration of wealth in a small group
of people with the new class now being able to be shown being
left out. There used to be a basic bargain. If you contributed
to the profitability of an enterprise, you got to share in the
profit. That's been broken. Productivity is up, wages are
stagnant.

BORGER: But Hillary's talking about that, and....

BIDEN: Well, it's -- but it's -- it's relatively new for Hillary
to talk about that. Hillary's focus has been other things up to
now, and that's been Bernie's -- no one questions Bernie's
authenticity on those issues.

Cue groans in Clinton campaign headquarters.

In an interview with the "Today" show Tuesday morning at the
White House, Biden sought to clean up the controversy caused by
his comments to Borger -- noting that "what I meant was for the
last five years she�s been engaged in foreign policy -- for four
years here." As for Sanders, "even when income inequality wasn�t
as serious as it is today, it was his drumbeat,� Biden said.
�[Clinton's] coming up with some very good ideas but Bernie is
pushing the envelope on this.�

Read between the lines of Biden's answers and you get this:
Bernie Sanders is doing better than most people expected because
he's authentic and actually believes what he says. Hillary is
fine but, let's be honest, she is talking about these issues now
because Bernie is forcing her hand. He's credible on issues of
economic inequality; she's not really.

It's not all that surprising that Biden threw Clinton under the
bus to Borger if you remember the duo's history. During his long
consideration of a 2016 run against Clinton, Biden -- and his
inner circle -- made it very clear that he resented Clinton's
attempts to cast herself as the natural heir to Obama's two
terms in office. And it's no secret that Biden has long viewed
Clinton as an overly cautious, poll-tested sort of politician --
the antithesis of his say-what-you-mean-and-mean-what-you-say
approach to public life.

Biden did offer a bit of a warning to Clinton (and everyone else
running for the Democratic nod) when he announced, back in
October 2015, that he wouldn't run for the nomination. "I intend
to speak out clearly and forcefully, to influence as much as I
can where we stand as a party and where we need to go as a
nation," Biden said at the time.

Regardless, Biden's comments could hardly come at a worse time
for Clinton -- or a better one for Sanders. Clinton's widely
assumed lead in Iowa appears to be eroding with less than three
weeks to go before the caucuses -- raising the possibility that
the Vermont socialist could sweep the first two states to vote
and throw what looked like something close to a coronation for
Clinton into chaos.

Here's another way to look at what Biden's comments will do to
the "Bernie rising/Hillary struggling" narrative -- via Homer J.
Simpson:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHjhP07HyAs

Biden, of course, knows what he is doing. Which is what makes it
all the more delicious, politically speaking.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/12/joe-
biden-just-trolled-hillary-clinton-big-
time/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_1_na
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