JOE BIDEN is mad as - well, mad as a compulsively collegial US senator, one who is on a first-name basis with seemingly everyone in Washington, can be.
"I am so goddarn sick and tired of Democrats being portrayed as being weak on terror, weak on national defense, weak on foreign policy," the Delaware Democrat tells me. "I ain't taking it no more."
Instead, the man who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is determined to push back.
"We are a weaker, less secure, more vulnerable nation today under these bravado Republicans than we have been in the last half-century," says Biden, who vows to provide any interested Democratic candidate with an overview of the ways in which Republican foreign policy has proved counterproductive.
In his pointed critique, the Bush administration's approach has us stuck treading water in Iraq, with little post-surge progress toward building a country that can defend, govern, and sustain itself in peace. Meanwhile, the war has damaged US credibility and thus its ability to lead in the world, while straining our military, draining our resources, and preventing us from doing all we need to in Afghanistan.
The real effect of the administration's approach to the region?
"Just look at the objective results," Biden says. "Freedom is not on the march in the Middle East. Iran is on the march in the Middle East."
As part of his self-appointed role as defender of the Democrats, Biden spoke this week at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, where he criticized the Republicans for "an emerging, ugly pattern of political attacks masquerading as policy."
There, he chastised Republican nominee-to-be John McCain for his recent attempt to paint Barack Obama as a patsy by saying that Hamas and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega favored the Democrat.
"What the hell is that?" he says now, in obvious disgust.
He also rebuked President Bush for remarks last week to the Israeli Knesset in which he compared those who would negotiate with Iran to those who had hoped to appease Hitler before World War II. Although the president didn't mention Obama by name, those remarks were widely seen as a broadside aimed at the Democratic front-runner.
"What is stunning is that this is the only president I know - and I've served with seven - who would engage in this kind of activity while overseas in the Knesset," Biden said in his speech. "What is disheartening is that John McCain, a man I admire, endorsed the president's remarks instead of repudiating them."
Despite attempts by McCain and Bush to make an issue of Obama's willingness to engage diplomatically with hostile nations, Biden pointed out that important Bush administration officials have taken a similar view.
"The day before the president spoke, his own secretary of defense called for engaging with Iran," he said. "His secretary of state has done so repeatedly." What's more, "the president himself authorized American diplomats to meet with their Iranian counterparts about Iraq. And he struck a deal with Libya's Khadafy and wrote polite letters to North Korea's Kim Jong Il . . ."
When it comes to Iran, the administration's saber rattling only drives up the price of oil, while uniting the Iranian people behind a leadership many of them otherwise hate, Biden says. The United States shouldn't treat Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as though he is the sole power when "the fact of the matter is that Iran is a fractured government," he says. Rather, we should try to engage on a number of different levels.
Although Biden's underfunded presidential campaign never caught fire, his foreign policy prowess won consistently strong reviews. And his lethally funny line skewering Rudy Giuliani - "there's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11" - remains one of the campaign's most memorable.
As a man who knows many of the world's leaders and has a formidable grasp of geopolitical complexities, Biden has the expertise to help the Democrats propound - and defend - a very different foreign policy. This country badly needs that debate, which is why it's good to see him stepping into the fray.
Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.
