We’re not likely to find a time in the history of electoral politics that didn’t feature at least one of the candidates involved taking shots at each other. We’d also be hard pressed to find a case when all parties in an election managed to resist the temptation to angle those shots towards matters that have nothing to do with public policy.
After all, the leadership of a nation presents as many opportunities as it does stressful responsibilities. And whether a politician wants those opportunities for the people or for themselves, it’s generally expected that they’ll use whatever weapon they can to increase their chances of gaining them.
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However, that doesn’t mean that every candidate will take every opportunity to score some political points. Sometimes people will simply have to do what they can live with and that seems to be what’s stopping former Vice President Joe Biden from exploiting one particular subject in his campaign.
As you’ve likely noticed by now, the campaign to re-elect President Donald Trump has spent a lot of time focusing on the dealings of Biden’s son, Hunter.
According to the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s fact-checking website , one of the claims made by Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, accuses the younger Biden of receiving $1.5 billion from a Chinese private equity firm.
Instead, the Center found that this was the total fundraising goal of a cross-border partnership that Biden was involved in, not any amount that he received. It’s also unclear whether that goal was even met.
Various Trump allies have also claimed that a New York Post article exposes evidence via a laptop supposedly obtained from Hunter Biden that his father helped direct American foreign policy in Ukraine to benefit his business activities.
However, It’s worth noting that The New York Times has reported that employees of the New York Post have stated the article in question was largely written by a staff reporter who refused to put his byline on it due to sourcing concerns at the heart of the story.
This concern was echoed by other employees of the paper, who didn’t feel enough was done to verify the laptop’s authenticity beyond accepting the statements of Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani.
The controversy around these claims was clearly on the minds of Jon Lovett and Dan Pfeiffer, who interviewed Joe Biden on their podcast *Pod Save America*.
And so Pfeiffer addressed the matter with Biden, saying, “On that debate stage and actually, throughout this campaign, President Trump has lobbed false accusation after false accusation about your son Hunter. For doing things that we know for a fact that Donald Trump’s children have been doing: profiting from the presidency.”
He then noted that Biden hasn’t engaged in any accusations about Trump’s children.
For example, the fact that Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. served as directors of the Trump Foundation who were forced to enrol in mandatory training after the Foundation was found to have funnelled $2.8 million intended for veteran’s charities through itself so some of it could be used at campaign rallies.
When it came to Biden’s silence on matters like these, Pfeiffer said, ” I assume that that’s a specific decision and I’m curious why you’ve made it.”
To this, Biden responded, “It’s a specific decision, and I just think it’s crass.”
As he went on to say , “I’m running against Donald Trump, not his children, and the American people want to hear about their families, not about Trump’s family or my family, although I’m very proud of my family.”
He concluded his answer by saying that responding to Trump’s accusations about his son in-kind doesn’t reflect how he was raised and that he’s committed to focusing on Trump himself.
However, that’s not to say that he’s never mentioned them.
Yet as The Hill reported , he’s largely kept his criticism focused on the ethics of Trump selecting Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, as White House advisors in the first place.
As they quote Biden as saying, “If I get elected president, my children are not going to have offices in the White House. My children are not going to sit in on Cabinet meetings.”
As we pass through the final days of the 2020 presidential election, it will remain to be seen whose strategy regarding the families of candidates proves more effective.
h/t: YouTube | Crooked Media
