Selling the name
This seems like a bad idea.
Hunter is writing a book about himself.
When Joe Biden first launched his presidential bid, inquiries about his son, Hunter, were so taboo they were met with the full fury of the campaign.
“Ask the right question!” Biden snapped at a reporter early in the campaign who asked about Hunter Biden’s business interests in Ukraine.
That’s bullshit. As I said about 5 thousand times during the campaign, Biden should have stopped him. Biden should have told his son he couldn’t leverage his daddy’s job into a highly lucrative job for himself for which he had no particular qualifications. It was sordid at best and corrupt at worst. Joe Biden had no right to snap at people asking about it.
Now, it’s the president’s son who is revealing his own story — and, along the way, opening himself up for more scrutiny — just as his father’s presidency is taking hold.
So, again, he’s leveraging his daddy’s job into profit for himself.
Hunter Biden’s new memoir, “Beautiful Things,” to be released April 6, details his struggles with addiction.
But it also piggybacks on his daddy’s job.
[T]he Biden family on Thursday said they stood by his decision to pen the book.
“The shared feeling is that telling this story takes a hell of a lot of strength and courage,” said a close Biden ally. “And right now when [the American public’s] substance use has increased during the coronavirus outbreak and when so many families are feeling the pain of the opioid epidemic, this is especially meaningful and could help others find the support they need. “
But also it will sell more copies because of who Daddy is.
Yes the Republicans exploited the Hunter issue during the campaign, but they didn’t create the issue. Hunter did that.
The Biden campaign adopted a strategy to forcefully push back on media questions about Hunter Biden, arguing it was a distraction from Trump’s conduct and likening the scenario to the media’s fixation on Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016.
So corruption is ok then.
The upcoming memoir is being portrayed as a way to further those conversations around addiction. But it could also open up Hunter Biden to charges that he is once more using his last name for profit.
Because he is.
Such criticism was directed at Ivanka Trump, when she published “Women Who Work” in 2017, months after Trump took office and she started working as a White House adviser to him. She said at the time that she’d donate the unpaid part of her advance and any royalties to charity. It is unclear what Hunter Biden plans to do with his earnings.
Donald Trump Jr., meanwhile, released “Triggered” and “Liberal Privilege” while his father was in the White House. The Republican National Committee bought copies of both books to give to donors, shelling out more than $100,000 on copies of “Triggered.”
Note to the DNC: don’t do that.
Well, I know that’s not a new phenomenon. I agree that families shouldn’t capitalize on the office, but I suspect this is beating one of those proverbial dead horses. I can’t find a good list, because google doesn’t understand the question, but one I did know is the book ostensibly written by the George Bush (41) family pet (penned by Barbara, I think). That came out while he was still in office, and definitely capitalized on the name. I can think of a number of presidential children and spouses who wrote books, but I don’t know how many of them were written while in office.
It does seem like a thing you should do – the Trump children all did it – but I suspect there would be a strong hesitation about limiting the families from writing books while the prez was in office. It seems like there have been many, many children and spouses that capitalize on the fame of the president, and it isn’t a pretty sight. Especially since so many of them don’t write well, but the publishers will lap up their books because of the fame.
While the criticism of Hunter is valid, I think that Joe Biden is between a rock and a hard place here. First of all, while in private he could ask his son not to profit off the name he has no power to order him not to publish the book. In public, Joe can either give his blessing or not. By standing by Hunter he is inviting this sort of criticism, but if he declares that he was against the book being published then the big story would be about a Biden family rift, a story which the Republicans could exploit to their own advantage. They’d be comparing the disunity between the Bidens with the tight-knit loyalty (yes, I know, but this is post-truth politics) of the Trumps, and they’d be asking how a man who can’t control his own son can be trusted to control the running of a country.
The best that Biden could have said was that he would rather Hunter had waited to publish until he was out of office, but that Hunter is an adult and free to make his own choices, but even that would leave the door open to accusations of weakness from the right. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t, really.
On an unrelated, pedantic note, in the opening quoted passage shouldn’t it be ‘enquiries’ rather than ‘inquiries’? I know that the two words are commonly accepted as interchangeable nowadays but, just as with ‘insure/ensure’ they do have distinctly seperate primary meanings and it really makes my teeth itch when I see them used the wrong way – at least as I was taught to use them, with an enquiry being a request for information and an inquiry being a formal investigation.
Sure, Joe B is between a rock and a hard place, but he should just do the least sleazy thing, especially because of the whole Ukraine sleaze. He should have put a stop to that, and having failed then, he should succeed now.
On your pedantic note – no, it’s a UK/US difference. Enquiry is all but dead here, and we don’t distinguish between the two.
@iknklast #1
Millie’s Book, by Barbara Bush
JFK released an inaugural edition of Profiles in Courage just before his inauguration.
Not written while Warren G. Harding was in office (and, therefore, not while he was alive, given that his term ended with his death), but an interesting twist on the phænomenon of books written by family or partners of presidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President%27s_Daughter_(Britton_book)
Might make a difference if HB donated all proceeds of book sales to addiction treatment programs.
One of the most boring genres imaginable, right up there with sports bios. Sorry, I don’t have enough time left in my life to read such garbage. Besides, if I want to read what self promoting name droppers and relatives-of have to opine about, that’s surely what twitter was created for, right Jack? :P
Like reading what self important blowhards like Bill O’Reilly have to say about anyfuckingthing. No thanks. :P