Thursday, March 22, 2007

On Biden Cancelling his Carson City Apperances Yesterday

So, Senator Biden's gamble didn't quite work. He figured, he could skip the SEIU forum in Las Vegas on Saturday (official reason: family obligations) and yet get press attention by coming to Carson City on Wednesday. Yesterday, he cancelled on short notice due to "important votes in the Senate."

While that is all valid and fine, here's the problem:

Biden has a day job (as do five other candidates). He's a Senator and therefore, when the Senate is in session, he should be in DC, and not toodling around on the campaign trail. As we're still more than nine months away from the primaries and caucuses, Biden (and Dodd, Hillary, Obama, Kucinich and Richardson) should show the voters how serious they are about wanting to be President, by actually doing their day job and only campaigning when their work schedules permit, meaning mostly weekends.

Now, I was a little curious and counted the numbers of votes missed by the four current Democratic Senators running out of 88 votes since January:

Biden: 22
Dodd: 22
Obama: 3
Hillary: 2

(comparison: McCain: 25, with Brownback and Hagel also frequently absent)

Biden and Dodd (as long as they haven't been sick or didn't have some serious family business to attend to) should either resign, so they can run full-time, or should resume their day job. Being absent 25% of the time from your day job while running for President is simply inexcusable.

So, it actually did bode well for Sen. Biden that he chose to stay in Washington last night. Otherwise his absenteeism rate would have jumped by another couple of votes.

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