Vice President Biden: Hillary Clinton faces "double standard" on trustworthiness
With nine days to go until Election Day and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton facing another round of damaging headlines about her private email server, Vice President Joe Biden said Clinton faces a “double standard” when it comes to her authenticity and trustworthiness.
“I get all of this credit for being authentic, and you know, and now even Biden gaffes are now, you know, ‘Biden tells the truth,’ kind of thing,” Biden said in a wide-ranging interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation,” taped Thursday before the news of the FBI’s renewed interest in Clinton’s emails. “But, I’m a guy. I go out, and if I start talking about my Beau and I get filled up, my son who died, they say, ‘Well, he’s just a good decent father, honorable man.’ If she were to do that, you’d have a chorus of, ‘She’s playing the woman card here. She’s crying.’
That double standard, Biden said, has made Clinton tend to “close rather than open” after three decades in public life. He added that part of it, too, is an issue of Clinton’s “personal style” as a politician.
“Hillary said herself, she said, ‘Look, I’m not that good a candidate.’ ... I think she said, ‘I’m not Bill or Barack,’’ Biden said. “And a lot of it has to do with personal style. And I do think … she is more measured and she makes fewer mistakes than I make or most people I know. But I just think it’s more--it doesn’t go to her integrity or honesty. It goes to her style.”
Asked whether the Clintons should shutter the Clinton Foundation, which has come under fire for accepting foreign donations while Clinton was serving as secretary of State, Biden said no—but that Bill and Hillary Clinton need to step back from the organization if she’s elected president.
“It does too much good to shut it down. I mean, it really-- I’ve not been you know the number one defender of the Clinton Foundation, but it’s done too much good,” he said. “So, shifting it to other control of others beyond the Clintons, I think it would be you know--I think it is going to be necessary when she becomes-- if she becomes president.”
Biden slammed Republican nominee Donald Trump for his refusal to acknowledge that Russia is behind the hacks into the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, saying it’s “bizarre.”
“Think about what that says to the rest of the world,” he said. “Here, the intelligence community of the United States government, the most -- the most potent military in the world with the most significant intelligence capability in the world says flatly, ‘We know it was out of Russia. And we know it was Putin,’ or, ‘We know it was the Russians.’”
“And a candidate for president who already is fawning over Putin says, ‘Well, how do they know?’” he continued. “What does -- what does that -- what does that do to the confidence of all our allies?”
Biden also talked about the Affordable Care Act, and responded to the news that premiums will rise 25 percent in 2017. The law will endure and should remain a top priority for the next president, he said, but it’s “not as good as it should be.”
“I don’t think it’s in peril,” he said of the law. “It’s not working as well as it should be ... because here’s what happens: you still have no one that can be denied health care for pre-existing condition in or out of the system. You still have children being able to stay on their parents’ health care till they’re age 26. You still have women not having to be -- not being able to be charged more than men. There’s a whole range of things that still justify it.”
Reflecting on his final few months in office and his position as a so-called “Obama Whisperer” in the White House, Biden said he and President Obama have complemented each other in the White House over the last eight years.
“The president kids, he said, ‘You know, Joe and I, we make up for each other’s shortcomings,’” he said. “He makes up for mine. I -- he has very few. So what it means is, I have his confidence. I am a close friend of his. He knows he can trust me 1000 percent.”
Neither he nor Mr. Obama will “go away” once they’re out of the White House, he said.
“The bottom line is both of us feel that there are the things that motivated us to get into politics are still the things that shape our lives and our interests, and make us happy,” he said. “And so you’re going to see the president deeply involved in a lot of the things he’s continued to be involved. And I’m -- I’m not going away. I’m, you know, everything from this issue of violence against women, to income inequality, to the cancer moonshot. I’m gonna devote the rest of my life to this.”
Asked whether the two men would still “hang out” after they leave office, Biden replied: “Yeah, for real.”
Biden, who considered a 2016 bid of his own, said the “vitriol” present in the current race ultimately makes him glad he didn’t run.
“So yeah, there’s sometimes I’m -- but look I, I think I made the right decision for my family and for me,” he said. “And I think Hillary’s going to be a hell of a good president.”
