Joe Biden: Hey, You Know Who's One of the Best Secretaries of State Ever? John Kerry

And not Hillary Clinton. He didn't expressly mention her, but she's been on his mind lately.

This NYT article noted how much she's been in his mind, and his desire to begin getting his own name out there as far as a candidate for 2016.

[T]heir relationship has also been shaped by awkwardness and slights, real and perceived, that Mr. Biden and his political advisers have felt as Mrs. Clinton attracted outsize attention and influence in the Democratic Party.

Now their friendship is being tested anew, as curiosity grows about their possible presidential candidacies for 2016 and Mr. Biden finds himself once again frustratingly eclipsed by the former first lady, whom Senate colleagues are already endorsing and political action committees are springing up to support.

Mr. Biden’s longtime political advisers grow easily exasperated about the subject and wonder how a sitting vice president who was highly engaged in the administration, especially on foreign policy, can be so easily overlooked in the presidential discussion....

“The undercurrent of ‘What about me?’ permeates from the top down in the vice president’s orbit,” one former administration official said.

...

Mr. Biden, 70, is keenly sensitive to perceptions about his political stature, and he is sending signals that he wants to be taken seriously in the 2016 conversation. He also wants to maintain maximum leverage within the Democratic establishment, especially with the Clintons, three people close to him said.

“Joe always says, ‘If you’re not on your way up, you’re on your way down,’ ” one of the people said. A former administration official aide agreed, saying, “He needs to make people think he has skin in the game in the future so that they treat him relevant now.”

Emphasis added.

It should also be noted that Joe Biden considers himself a Foreign Policy Genius, and would probably be shocked to find out that he's pretty much the only person who believes that bit of Old Man's Nonsense.

So the Intellect of the Democratic Party, kind of a grin with a body behind it (as Clint Eastwood remarked), announces that he's going to be doing this sort of thing and then, having openly announced his subtext, awkwardly does so.

Now that's what I call Master Diplomacy.

posted by Ace at 01:33 PM

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