Ex-Biden Aide: Obama and Biden are “Both Financially Illiterate.”

Daniel Greenfield


Obama told Leno that he’s bad at math and now we have independent confirmation of that. Still you have to be really financially illiterate to run annual trillion dollar deficits while running on a pledge to cut the deficit.

Author Jeff Connaughton, a Biden Senate staffer turned lobbyist, is by his own admission deeply disillusioned with the capital and embittered about his experience with the man who inspired him to enter politics.

“I came to D.C. a Democrat and left a plutocrat,” he confesses.

So did the entire Democratic Party. This is a tell-all book telling us things that we already know or could have easily guessed.

Adding another wild-card to the 2012 campaign’s final days, a former aide to Vice President Joe Biden has written a tell-all Washington memoir in which he lacerates the former Delaware senator as an “egomaniacal autocrat” who was “determined to manage his staff through fear.”

Not exactly a major surprise for anyone who saw Biden’s performance at the last debate. The man is a jackass and probably treats staffers almost as badly as Ralph Nader or Michael Moore, both of whom have left behind their own trail of horror stories.

President Obama and Biden, he writes, are “both financially illiterate.”

Again, not very surprising. And not just financially.

In the prologue, Connaughton recounts the 2008 campaign gaffe when Biden predicted that Obama would be tested soon into his term.

In a meeting with Connaughton and some of his other advisers a few days after the election, Biden revealed that he had been upbraided by an angry Obama.

“Biden told us that Obama had called him and told him sharply that he didn’t need public tutoring: ‘I don’t need you acting like you’re my Henry Higgins,’” Connaughton writes. “Biden said his private reaction was, ‘Whoa. Where did this come from? This is clearly a guy who could restrict my role to attending state funerals or just put me in a closet for four years.”
Biden added: “I’m going to have to earn his trust, but I’m not going to grovel to this guy. My manhood is not negotiable.”

“Biden: My Manhood is Not Negotiable” was the original headline for this article. It’s also the title of Biden’s upcoming biography.

“Ted tried to console me,” Connaughton writes of Kaufman: “ ‘Jeff, don’t take this personally. Biden disappoints everyone. He’s an equal-opportunity disappointer.’ ”

Well at least he’s not a racist disappointer. Chris Matthews will be pleased.

Connaughton writes that the turn of events left him to conclude that Biden was not interested in helping those who had been loyal to him.
“His ambitions, I was coming to understand, were mainly about himself,” writes the former staffer.

Yet another thing Biden has in common with Obama.

“If the Marine Corps’s hierarchy of allegiance is unit, corps, country, God, then the hierarchy for a Professional Democrat is current firm, former-elected-official boss, the congressional Democratic leadership, and the president (if he or she is a Democrat),” Connaughton writes.