GOPhers win Vice President derby — No assassination insurance on either side
1. Joe Biden is very knowledgable and thoughtful about constitutional law — has been right for decades re eg crackpots like Robert Bork and Catherine MacKinnon.
He was also vocal and right during the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, when most Washingtonians either didn’t care or were too prudent to speak up.
For these reasons, Biden became one of my favorite senators.
But he was an unproductive, uninspired, indeed chicken-shit choice for VP.
He would have been a good Secy of State — and had been quietly campaigning for the job ever since retiring from the presidential race. Was offering him the VP slot instead a way for Team Obama to take that off the table?
And, of course, choosing Biden — a close friend of the Clintons — was a gentle way to say No to Hillary, for the Young Turks to tell the world that they want nothing to do with DLC moderation.
An Obama-Clinton ticket would have been impervious to the Sarah Palin move.
Biden on the other hand seems to bring to the ticket not a bleedin’ county of the contested electoral map.
What was the thinking here? Biden’s roots in the Wyoming Valley (where Scranton and Wilkes Barre lay) sure to capture Pennsylvania? But he’s been in DC so long, and is such a sharpie, that it’s hard to think he still shines as a Favorite Sun in a Carbondale cafe.
Team Obama, then, seems to have been more concerned here with party infighting — sidetracking Biden out of the State Dept, burying the Clintons, asserting their Youth Movement — than with defeating the GOPher. Classic complacency. The stuff jaw-dropping defeats are made of.
Also, I can’t help but note that Biden provides no assasination insurance.
That is: Any interest intent on removing President Obama — whether a warped lone cracker or a cabal of passionate militarists — would surely find the prospect of President Biden less than a show stopper. Hillary would have served better here, too.
Choosing Biden, then, seems to have been a large error: the first cause for serious worry about Team Obama’s judgment.
2. Across the years I had admired Senator McCain for his steady push for campaign finance reform, and then appreciated his steady grinding on the Dubya gang.
He is the best GOP candidate of my lifetime, which began late in Eisenhower.
And it was certainly more “fiercely urgent” to depose Bush-Cheney in 2004 than it is to keep McCain out of the White House now.
Such, anyway, were my theelings before he invited Sarah Palin to town.
It was, to begin, vile hack politics for McCain to have chosen her. The country he professes to love has been done a disloyal disservice.
And now — given McCain’s age and health — it seems fiercely urgent indeed that Obama win. Simply to prevent the rise of a President Palin.
She would be as fine a hand puppet as Reagan and Dubya were — better, indeed, than the latter ever has been. She’s sexy, chipper, telegenic. Just perfect. The worst side of Reaganism would miraculously revive.
And so far she seems to be bringing the GOPhers votes: Inspiring supposed conservatives who were discouraged by McCain’s nomination — and, more importantly, drawing some middle-of-the-road women who found that the trouncing of Hillary (more by the TV flacks than Barack) had left a bad taste in their mouths.
Perhaps she’ll blow up. Perhaps a debate with Biden will send some women back to the Donkeys.
Pundits point out that McCain had little choice but to do something daring, to get back in the race after Barack’s potent speech in Denver. Nevertheless, choosing Palin now glows on TV as gutsy and inspired — and all the more so when compared with Obama’s lame move.
So far, then, the Donkeys are getting clobbered in the VP derby.
It will be interesting, should McCain win, to see how the academic feminists who splintered the Democratic Party’s base in the 80s (with Identity Politics targeted at the White Male Hegemony) will react to the prospect of President Palin up their butts.
As for assassination insurance, McCain too seems to have ignored the notion. The passionate militarist would see in Vice President Palin a more malleable playmate than the maverick former POW.
And as for the warped cracker … In North Carolina two weeks ago I heard Rush Limbaugh (doesn’t like McCain) bellyaching for “a rock gut conservative” to seize Washington by the throat.
Sarah, he and has his foaming felt-clad audience felt, would do fine.
Seems the next president, then, may be spending motorcade time squinting over his shoulder into the sun.
ed says:
Maureen Dowd in NY Times visited Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah’s home town.
Her report today is rather amusing. Concludes, however:
QUOTE
R. D. Levno, a retired school principal, flew in from Fairbanks.
“She’s a child, inexperienced and simplistic,†she said of Sarah. “It’s taking us back to junior high school. She’s one of the popular girls, but one of the mean girls. She is seductive, but she is invented.â€
September 17th, 2008 at 1:01 pm