An Excellent Choice!
If major party presidential nominations went to the most experienced and able candidate, Joe Biden would be the 2008 Democratic nominee. Biden, a senator since 1973 and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, might then pick a rising newcomer from Illinois named Barack Obama to be his running-mate.
But in the real world, presidential nominations go to candidates with an undefinable asset known as charisma: a combination of appearance, intelligence, and rhetorical skills that make people like and trust them. John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan had it, Obama has it now, and Joe Biden never had it and never will.
Non-charismatic candidates do get slated for Vice-president: Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Richard Nixon, George H W Bush and Al Gore are all examples of men who won a presidential nomination after soldiering 4 or 8 eight years as a loyal vice-president. Nixon and senior Bush went on to become President. Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford all inherited the presidency and then were nominated for full terms; I doubt that any of them could have won a presidential nomination any other way.
By choosing the more senior and experienced fellow senator as his running-mate , Obama has followed the example of Senator John F Kennedy, who offered the second spot to Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas. The ticket carried Texas and narrowly won the presidency. However, when Michael Dukakis picked Senator Lloyd Benson for Veep in 1988 the Texas gambit failed; the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket lost the Lone Star state to Texan-by-choice Vice President George Bush. Apparently Bentsen was no Lyndon B Johnson.
Republicans are already crowing that Biden derided Obama as "not ready to lead" during the Iowa Caucus campaign. Most voters realize that nowadays nearly all contested elections include a certain modicum of negative campaigning (alias "mud-slinging"), so that whenever a defeated primary candidate is slated for VP, the opposite party can find some quote like this. Lyndon Johnson said the same thing about John Kennedy before the 1960 Democratic Convention. And who can forget "voodoo economics?" (1)
If Barack Obama is a political rocket, zooming from Illinois state senator to presidential nominee in a mere four years, Biden is the stabilizer, the gizmo that keeps the projectile on a steady course. Unlike LBJ, Biden does not represent a crucial big state. But to older, working-class voters in the major battle-ground states of Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Joe Biden is a living reminder that this is still "your father's Democratic Party."
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(1) Bush sr used this phrase to describe Ronald Reagan's proposed tax-cuts. He denied the quote, but videotapes prove he said it.
But in the real world, presidential nominations go to candidates with an undefinable asset known as charisma: a combination of appearance, intelligence, and rhetorical skills that make people like and trust them. John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan had it, Obama has it now, and Joe Biden never had it and never will.
Non-charismatic candidates do get slated for Vice-president: Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Richard Nixon, George H W Bush and Al Gore are all examples of men who won a presidential nomination after soldiering 4 or 8 eight years as a loyal vice-president. Nixon and senior Bush went on to become President. Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford all inherited the presidency and then were nominated for full terms; I doubt that any of them could have won a presidential nomination any other way.
By choosing the more senior and experienced fellow senator as his running-mate , Obama has followed the example of Senator John F Kennedy, who offered the second spot to Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas. The ticket carried Texas and narrowly won the presidency. However, when Michael Dukakis picked Senator Lloyd Benson for Veep in 1988 the Texas gambit failed; the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket lost the Lone Star state to Texan-by-choice Vice President George Bush. Apparently Bentsen was no Lyndon B Johnson.
Republicans are already crowing that Biden derided Obama as "not ready to lead" during the Iowa Caucus campaign. Most voters realize that nowadays nearly all contested elections include a certain modicum of negative campaigning (alias "mud-slinging"), so that whenever a defeated primary candidate is slated for VP, the opposite party can find some quote like this. Lyndon Johnson said the same thing about John Kennedy before the 1960 Democratic Convention. And who can forget "voodoo economics?" (1)
If Barack Obama is a political rocket, zooming from Illinois state senator to presidential nominee in a mere four years, Biden is the stabilizer, the gizmo that keeps the projectile on a steady course. Unlike LBJ, Biden does not represent a crucial big state. But to older, working-class voters in the major battle-ground states of Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Joe Biden is a living reminder that this is still "your father's Democratic Party."
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(1) Bush sr used this phrase to describe Ronald Reagan's proposed tax-cuts. He denied the quote, but videotapes prove he said it.
posted by Gerald S Glazer at 11:42 AM
1 Comments:
Below is a good response published today. The Obama-Biden ideas and approaches to governing are surely very reminsicent of Jimmy Carter's.
Back to Jimmy
By Amir Taheri
New York Post | 8/26/2008
BY choosing Sen. Joseph Biden as his vice-presidential running mate, Barack Obama sent three messages. The first two are implicit admissions that Hillary Clinton had a point in the primaries. The third tells us more of what Obama means by "change."
Biden is supposed to make up for Obama's lack of the knowledge and experience needed to leader on national security and international affairs. And the Delaware senator, with his humble working-class origins, is also meant to reassure the "simple folk" that Obama seems to be losing.
But the third message is that "change" means a return not to the Camelot of President John Kennedy, but to the foreign policies of Jimmy Carter. For Biden, an early supporter of Carter in his quest for the presidency in 1976, shares the former president's view of the world and the United States' place in it.
In 2004, I was astonished to hear Biden doing his own bit of America-bashing in front of an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The US, he claimed, had no moral authority to preach democracy in the Middle East. "We don' have much of a democracy ourselves, " he said mockingly. "Remember our own presidential election; remember Florida!"
Biden has the experience of more than three decades in the US senate, at least two of them dealing with foreign affairs and defense. But experience is no guarantee of good judgment. And Biden has been wrong on almost every key issue.
* In 1979, he shared Carter's starry-eyed belief that the fall of the shah in Iran and the advent of the ayatollahs represented progress for human rights. Throughout the hostage crisis, as US diplomats were daily paraded blindfolded in front of television cameras and threatened with execution, he opposed strong action against the terrorist mullahs and preached dialogue.
* Throughout the 1980s. Biden opposed President Ronald Reagan's proactive policy against the Soviet Union. Biden was all for détente - which, in practice, meant Western subsidies that would have enabled the moribund USSR to cling to life and continue doing mischief.
* In 1990, Biden found it difficult to support President George Bush's decision to use force to kick Saddam Hussein's army of occupation out of Kuwait.
* A decade-plus later, the senator did vote for the liberation of Iraq from Saddamite tyranny. But as soon as terrorists started challenging the new democratic system in Iraq, he switched sides and became a critic of the whole war effort. He claimed that the Iraq war was lost and suggested that the US partition the newly liberated country into three or more mini-states.
Biden's misreading of the situation in Iraq shows that experience is no substitute for judgment. He judged the situation on the basis of headlines and CNN footage - not the long-term, geo-strategic interests of the United States. In short, he lacked what President Harry Truman called "strategic patience."
* For more than a decade, Biden has adopted an ambivalent attitude towards the Islamic Republic in Tehran, now emerging as the chief challenger to US interests in the Middle East. Biden's links with pro-Tehran lobbies in the US and his support for "unconditional dialogue" with the mullahs echo Obama's own wrong-headed promise to circumvent the current multilateral efforts by seeking direct US-Iran talks, excluding the Europeans as well as Russia and China.
Had Biden had his way, "the Evil Empire" would still be around and Saddam Hussein still in power. The US would still be begging the mullahs of Tehran for forgiveness of unspecified "past sins" - and more American hostages would be seized in the Middle East while the mullahs celebrate their first atomic bombs.
By choosing Biden, Obama, the candidate of hope, has transformed his promise of change, into a back-to-the-future pirouette - back to Jimmy Carter.
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