Biden declines to respond to Sanders’ ‘ridiculous’ attack on his policy record

As we get closer to learning who President Donald Trump’s 2020 challenger will be, it appears that current Democrat frontrunner Joe Biden is continuing to lose steam.

This week, Biden’s top rival for his party’s nomination — Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — leveled some harsh criticism at the former vice president, but rather than hit back, Biden sort of just took it on the chin, Fox News reported.

Bernie on the attack

The exchange between Sanders and Biden started earlier in the week with the former taking shots at the latter in an interview he gave to the Washington Post. There, Sanders exposed some of the “baggage” he says Biden is carrying.

“People are tired of the traditional types of campaigns in which candidates like Joe are running to wealthy people’s homes and raising large sums of money,” Sanders said. “It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that Trump will be saying, ‘You see this guy? He voted for NAFTA.”

Sanders had similar comments about Biden in an interview last month with the Los Angeles Times.

“Joe Biden is a personal friend of mine,” said Sanders. “So, I’m not here to, you know, to attack him.”

It appears, however, that Sander just couldn’t help himself.

“If you’re a Donald Trump and you got Biden having voted for the war in Iraq, Biden having voted for these terrible, in my view, trade agreements, Biden having voted for the bankruptcy bill,” Sanders said, “Trump will eat his lunch.”

Biden responds — kind of

On Friday, reporters asked Biden to respond to Sanders’ biting commentary. Somewhat surprisingly, though, he chose not to hit back.

“I don’t respond to Bernie’s ridiculous comments,” Biden said. “You’re not going to get me in a fight with Bernie. Bernie’s got enough baggage.”

Unlike Sanders, however, Biden chose not to put his opponent’s dirty laundry out to dry. Accordingly, one starts to wonder — is Biden’s campaign effort collapsing? Is he losing the will to win?

With just under a month left to go before the Iowa caucus on Feb. 3, Biden and Sanders are leading the Democratic field with 29.4% and 19.4% of the vote, respectively. But, whether Biden can maintain his advantage with such tepid responses to critiques from his rivals, only time will tell.