Biden: Dems Should Be Poor, Like Me

AP17 Jul 2015

He’s not in the presidential race. Yet.

But if Joe Biden does decide to run, look for him to think small. As in, small donations.

“Folks, we ought to start in our own party,” he told a liberal gathering this week. “You ought to be demanding of all of us, all of us, because at least in our own party fights among ourselves, in primaries, that we adhere to a policy that doesn’t rest on millionaires and billionaires.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with being wealthy, he hastened to add. It’s fine to “take their money in limited amounts,” Biden said. But, he warned, candidates must also be willing to stand up to big donors.

“We can do something about the corrosive impact of massive amounts of money. We can demand that the people we support don’t yield to millionaires and billionaires,” the vice president insisted.

Could Biden have anyone in mind?

“I know a lot of people are going to read into this part of what I’m saying something I’m not intending. I’m not talking about any individual. I really am not,” the veep insisted. Still, it seems like a thinly veiled shot at Hillary Clinton (a millionaire in her own right, of course).

Clinton’s campaign has spent more than her Democrat opponents have raised this year. And for Biden, perhaps charity should begin at home. After all his boss, Barack Obama, was the first presidential candidate to forgo federal funding, which he did in the 2008 election with Biden at his side.