Publisher Emeritus
OK, so I’m voting for Joe Biden.
Call me sentimental.
Call me a “hometowner.”
Behind it all is the reality that few of us, most of us, never get a chance to vote for a friend, a neighbor, a long-time colleague and acquaintance for President of the United States (POTUS).
I’m not virulently and violently anti-Donald Trump for two reasons.
First, it was we Democrats – yes, I’m a lifelong Democrat who actually was VP of the Campus Democrats at the University of Illinois in the 1960s, who cast my first presidential vote in 1968 for LBJ – who basically elected him. We put up Hillary Clinton in 2016. She had had lied to us so blatantly in September 2012 – after Muslim Jihadist terrorists killed our US Ambassador and our Embassy defenders when they attacked America at Benghazi, Libya – to help get Barack Obama re-elected despite pretending the attack never happened, that voters just threw up.
Second, President Trump has given America what voters elected him for, a stronger military, stronger and tighter borders against invasion via illegal immigration, a Supreme Court that can be a real check on excess on either side, and – until the coronavirus pandemic – a robust economy.
Yeah, he’s an idiot, a jerk and a classic narcissist, and he’s very low on the personal values scale. But it’s politics, and there are a lot of Donald Trumps in politics who are more circumspect about their objectionable qualities.
And, in Joe’s case, yes, I’m terribly concerned about the Marxists among the Bernie Sanders’ socialists who are swarming Democrat leadership in an effort to fundamentally remake America. Their proximity to Joe Biden gives that influential political minority an opportunity to remake America in the image of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin.
I volunteered in 1967 as a farm boy patriot to give my life for America in Vietnam in our country’s struggle against global Marxist-Leninist Marxism, then labeled Communism. Ultimately, that system failed and imploded on its own in 1990, but American Marxists have resurrected it and rebranded it Socialism to dispose of free-market regulated Capitalism.
But, even though Joe always has been a bit more liberal than me, I’ve always liked him. Yes, he represents the Teddy Kennedy school of Big Government Solutions, and I’m a “small central government guy,” as the Founders seemed to have been.
I’m progressive on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and I was outspoken in favor of recognition of same gender couples and marriages – in a Baptist Church I attend – before Barack Obama had the guts to do so.
Beau Biden, Joe’s son, absolutely was what Joe says, as fine a man as any of us would want to meet. Beau’s sister, Ashley Biden, has grown into an incredible young woman, not yet 40, who I have had the opportunity to mentor over the years.
I don’t really know Hunter Biden, who has lurched into the news this year, although Joe introduced us a couple of times in passing in town.
Since his rise to Vice President, I’ve written several columns in this publication about Joe. One of them he returned to me in January 2018 with the inscription, “Sam, you have always been good to me! Keep the Faith! Joe”
He inscribed his autobiography, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics (2007), “To Sam, Thirty-two years together in Del politics. Keep the Faith! Joe 9-17-07.”
Yeah, do the math, and you’ll see that Joe and I have known each other since 1975, when the News Journal brought me to Delaware to cover politics, including State Government and our Congressional delegation. I was its last State Capitol Bureau Chief in 1976-77 during Joe’s first term in the US Senate.
During a few years away from journalism, I actually organized and hosted a fundraiser for Joe in his 2002 re-election campaign. With the help of Joe’s “bag man,” Dennis Toner, I hosted it at a friend’s home in Westover Hills, where Joe kidded me it was his first-ever Westover Hills fundraiser, given the neighborhood’s propensity to Republican politics.
Among the things I’d like to see from Joe before the campaign ends:
- I’d like to see him commit to not increasing the size of the Supreme Court.
- I’d like to see the family come clean on the Hunter Biden issue(s), rather than just “shoot the messenger,” the New
York Post. - I’d like to see a statement of independence from America’s new Marxist Communist Socialist movement.
As all Americans should be, I’ll be OK with however America votes this year, and I’ll wish whichever candidate wins good luck when he takes office in January 2021.
After all, as Americans, we have a lot at stake.
But, yes, I’m voting for Joe.
Sam Waltz is publisher emeritus of the Delaware Business Times.
