U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., is running for president.

Sure, it’s not news. Biden said the same thing a year ago on CBS’ Face the Nation. But he repeated the unqualified declaration Sunday in a wide-ranging interview with us at Various Things & Stuff. “I’m just flat gonna run,” he said.

He’s spent the year since making the declaration taking his message on the road, especially the south, where he believes a Democrat has to be competitive to win the White House. “My message sells in the South,” he says.

He’s raised about $4 million, and estimates he’ll need to raise $31 million to get through the New Hampshire primary, which he’s working on, along with building a national campaign network. (He last ran for president in 1988, but dropped out in 1987. He also toyed with the idea of running against Bush in 2004, but ultimately decided against it.)

That’s the political angle; now let’s get to the policy stuff, which we love, since we’re dorks. But hey, you’re reading a blog written by us, so that must mean you love it, too, or have stumbled badly looking for the Paris Hilton video. Here we go!

• Although resolutions by U.S. Sens. John Kerry and Russ Feingold calling for the withdrawl of U.S. troops from Iraq were voted down in recent days, Biden said the administration is nonetheless planning to bring soldiers home. (Ironic, then, that presidential political advisor Karl Rove would describe Democratic initiatives as “cut and run,” isn’t it?)

But soldiers are coming home, Biden said, because we cannot sustain the troop levels we have in Iraq without “breaking the volunteer Army.” In fact, he said, the Army will have to be rebuilt by the next president because of the long deployments and plummeting recruitment that have resulted in the war in Iraq. But that won’t be a problem, since U.S. latitude in the use of force will be vastly limited in future years because of an “Iraq syndrome” similar to post-Vietnam reluctance to commit military forces.

• Like former President Bill Clinton, Biden said neoconservative figures in the administration really believe what they say. “Nothing stops these guys,” he said.

But their theory — that America is so powerful, a single use of force in Iraq would cause the nation’s enemies to bow to U.S. power — failed. Iran and North Korea, if anything, have become more belligerent and less susceptible to American pressure as a result of the Iraq war.

“The world responds to reality, not perception. And these guys can’t get beyond what their perception of the world should be,” he said.

• Why not censure President Bush for things like warantless NSA wiretapping, falsely linking al-Qaida Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Sept. 11, or domestic phone call data mining? Biden said it wasn’t politically or realistically necessary.

“What the American public wants is results. That [censure resolution] doesn’t change one thing in their life,” he said. “They’ve closed the book on this guy.”

In fact, by Bush’s own standard of judgment, conducting the war in Iraq, confronting the “axis of evil,” and making the country domestically safer than before Sept. 11, 2001, Bush fails, Biden said.

• Democrats are consistently victimized by Republican distraction strategies, leaving them debating whether their party is in disarray, whether gay marriage should be constitutionally forbidden and whether flag burning should be illegal instead of debating the competence of the incumbents.

“This is the most incompetent administration,” Biden said. “Every time they were faced with a good choice and a bad choice, they chose the bad choice.”

But the Democrats are also victimized by the fact that they are perceived to disdain religion, even though many are devout in their own faith. (Biden, for example, is a practicing Catholic. When former President Ronald Reagan once chided Biden about a prayer-in-schools amendment to a bill, Biden responded that he attended church weekly, while Reagan hadn’t gone in years. “That’s a good point,” Reagan replied.)

Democrats cannot be the party that appears to care only about the poor and disadvantaged. It takes a middle-class consensus to make social policy to help the poor anyway, Biden said, and Democrats showed under Clinton their policies can help the middle class grow.

“The Democratic Party needs to speak to the middle class again,” he said. And the next Democratic nominee is going to need to speak about two main issues — faith and security — in order to win.

• Nevada may help in choosing who might be the next Democratic nominee, if a proposal to create an early party caucus is approved. That means we’ll probably be seeing more of Biden, as well as Democrats like former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, New York U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack starting next year.

• When we moved to Nevada, lo those many years ago, we were surprised by an odd phenomenon that took place here that would never have happened in our native California: Political consultants who represented Republicans and Democrats.

That same thing caught the eye of the Las Vegas Sun’s J. Patrick Coolican, who penned a story about it on Saturday. The piece notes that virtually every consultant in town does it, with the exception of Gary Gray, a loyal Democrat. (Gray’s wife, Assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani is running against veteran Clark County Commissioner Myrna Williams, who is represented by, among others, Republican consultant Mike Slanker.)

Lots of reasons for the odd line-crossing are given, including Nevada’s small-town political culture, “where friendships matter more than parties.” The ubiquitous “gaming party” of former state Sen. Joe Neal’s formulation is another reason: They don’t care your party affiliation, so long as you do what they want. And then there’s the “doing it for the money,” excuse, proffered by Republican consultant Steve Wark, who of late does some business with Democrat Billy Rogers under the business name “Third Rail.” Hmmm, hiring out your services to anybody just for the money. Doesn’t the Bible say that’s wrong somewhere?

The coziness of the political consulting culture has led more than one candidate (say, gubernatorial hopeful Jan Jones, or current candidate for governor Dina Titus) to seek help outside the state for their campaigns. Conversely, hiring a talented and big-name consultant, say Sig Rogich or Billy Vassiliadis, is an indication that a campaign is serious.

Gray, however, had some reservations, and we think his points have some merit (then again, we’re unabashed partisans, so it figures we’d back him up, right?). It seems to us that it would require a certain undesirable intellectual and moral flexibility to represent a pro-choice, pro-taxes, pro-environment progressive in one election, and then turn around to represent a pro-life, anti-tax, pro-business small government conservative in the next. This isn’t like criminal defense law, folks, where they train you to take all comers and give everybody a good defense. This is an ideological contest over the way we want our country to look in the future.

We’ll let Gray add his two cents:

“I can explain it by one word, and that’s money,” Gray said. “I’m baffled by the acceptance of it, by everybody who participates in it.” Sadly, that’s pretty much everybody.

• We’ve got to hand it to Las Vegas Sun Editor Brian Greenspun for his Sunday column taking the Review-Journal to task over its stance on President George W. Bush’s judicial nominations.

You can’t browbeat the Senate into approving right-wing judges, and then bitch when they issue right-wing rulings, Greenspun said. (He was referring to the U.S. Supreme Court’s blessing of “no-knock” rules when the authorities come to your house with a warrant, since knocking gives bad people a chance to hide evidence of their naughtiness. Just when we bought that cool new “When the Saints Come Marching In” doorbell ringer, too!)

To be totally honest, our friend and colleague Hugh Jackson, sharp as always, was the first to notice the R-J’s be-careful-what-you-wish-for problem in Las Vegas Gleaner last week. Hey, do you suppose Greenspun is gleaning from the Gleaner?

Either way, they’re both right. Now, the R-J will say — in fact, did say — that the ruling wasn’t conservative, but totalitarian. And that’s true. If only that distinction still mattered to the present administration.

And that’s why you’ve got to be careful what you wish for.

• U.S. Rep. Peter King is plenty pissed off at the New York Times. First, the Gray Lady broke news that President Bush was wiretapping American citizens international phone calls and e-mails without warrants. And now the paper blew the whistle on a program that allows the government to track overseas wire transfers of money.

“We’re at war, and for the Times to release this information about secret operations is treasonous,” King fumed. The Times is “more concerned about a left-wing elitist agenda than it is about the security of the American people.”

While we think King is full of it, for many reasons, including the fact that his outrage was somehow contained when members of this administration outed an undercover CIA operative. Or how about that time that Geraldo Rivera drew a map in the sand of U.S. troop positions? We don’t recall King bitching then.

Anyway, it’s not our place to defend the Times. We’ll leave that to Executive Editor Bill Keller, who wrote a response to critics.

We’d only wonder how long it would take the American people, who King selectively venerates in his remarks, to wonder why the press hadn’t told them about American spying when it got down to a level that they’d find objectionable. Say, with keystroke-level monitoring of Internet use? Or a national ID card required for state-to-state travel, with an RFID chip enabling anybody with a card reader to know who you are and everything else about you? Or routine monitoring of all telephone calls, e-mails, text messages and even good old snail mail?

We’d probably catch a lot of criminals that way, and maybe make it harder for terrorists to attack the land of the free. Only we wouldn’t be able to call it that anymore.

Wouldn’t the people wonder where their newspapers had been while all this was going on? Sure, they would. Of course, by then it would be too late.

• Talk about a case of bad spin.

In R-J political reporter Molly Ball’s notebook today, we’re told U.S. Rep. Jon Porter didn’t vote against a minimum wage increase, as some have said. In fact, he … well, let’s just let the item speak for itself:

“A spokesman for Porter said the House vote was actually a procedural vote on whether to deviate from the planned agenda. Democrats said that if that was approved, they would introduce a minimum wage proposal. But Porter wanted to move ahead to an item he considered more important — making permanent several tax cuts, including the repeal of the estate tax.

“‘We need to do everything in our power to sustain our booming economy, which includes making tax cuts permanent,’ Porter said of that vote.

“As for where Porter stands on raising the minimum wage, his spokesman, Trevor Kolego, said he would consider it.

“‘Historically, Representative Porter has said this is a states’ issue,’ Kolego said. ‘He does however look forward to an actual discussion on the minimum wage where the pros and cons can be openly debated and will discuss any potential impacts with Southern Nevadans before making any final decisions.’”

Got that? Porter passed on a chance to give the lowest wage earners in America a long-overdue raise so he could vote on giving the most well-off people in the country tax relief! He literally passed over the poor, to help out the rich, since he considered that more important. And this is the defense his own people are offering! It’s almost like he’s running against himself.

Oh, and by the by, when we put “look forward to an actual discussion on the minimum wage” and “potential impacts with Southern Nevadans” into the Republican Universal Translator, we get “look forward to deep-sixing this baby as soon as possible” because “business doesn’t like it, and therefore, neither do I.”

Pathetic.