Biden Tells Voters to Look to the Past. [View all]

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For months, he played the big-talking front-runner, swaggering if rarely steady, hoping voters would not linger long on the tautology of his premise: Joe Biden was the candidate who should win, he told fellow Democrats, because he was the candidate who could win.

So it was with some apparent humility — and then plenty of residual swagger — that Mr. Biden, days off a fourth-place debacle in Iowa, opened Friday night’s debate with an unusual prediction: He would probably do some more losing next week. “I took a hit in Iowa,” the former vice president allowed. “I’ll probably take a hit here. (New Hamsphire)”

Mr. Biden, in one of several forceful defenses of his long record in Washington, adopted the uncommon political strategy of trumpeting the old ways of doing business, after Mr. Buttigieg urged voters to “leave the politics of the past in the past.”

“The politics of the past, I think, were not all that bad,” Mr. Biden said, spending the night ticking off highlights of the Obama administration and his legislative career. He was at least “part of the reason,” he said, for the following events in American history: the confirmation of Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor; the non-confirmation of Judge Robert H. Bork; and the Iran nuclear deal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/us/politics/joe-biden-debate-new-hampshire.html