Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…Biden. Tell us why. Joe Biden has been — as far as I can tell in my reporting, as far as anybody can tell — he has taken on a series of pretty important jobs for the administration going back to copping the stimulus, which actually did go out with a very, very low level of fraud. Work he did on gun control didn’t really go anywhere, but in terms of the task force piece of the administration it was well conducted. He has been very, very important in pushing through a bunch of congressional deals. And he’s played a role that I respect in organizations of often being the skunk at the party, particularly in Obama’s dealings with the military. Biden’s role in a lot of that was to act as the counterweight in a way that’s very socially uncomfortable and is related to Joe Biden’s very particular set of skills which may not have been — are not always adaptive, but I think are adaptive in that particular circumstance. Yet, at the same time he’s been, by all accounts, a very successful vice president. People forget that his was actually the most highly rated convention speech at the 2012 convention, even more so, if I remember correctly, than Bill Clinton. He arguably really played a big role in the election by getting their debates back on track after Obama flubbed the first debate. He is looked at in a way that I have looked into, and reported on, and tried to understand as sort of a joke. The gap between the esteem in his public reputation as Uncle Joe and the gravity of his career, and what he’s done, and the role he’s played with Obama I think is very, very, very wide. Some questions about politics. Let’s put aside policy conclusions. Just models of the world. You have a model of the world, and President Obama has a model of the world. Your knowledge of his model is highly, highly imperfect. But just from what you know, from whatever distance you observe what he does and says, what do you think is the main difference, in analytical terms, between your model and his?…

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