It didn’t take long for news of Barack Obama’s selection of Joe Biden as his vice presidential running mate to stir John McCain’s campaign PR machine. The first comments from McCain’s people were released quickly and contained a fair measure of respect for Biden himself. In fact, they relied wholly on Biden’s assessment of Obama when they were competing for the Democratic nomination:
“There has been no harsher critic of Barack Obama’s lack of experience than Joe Biden. Biden has denounced Barack Obama’s poor foreign policy judgment and has strongly argued in his own words what Americans are quickly realizing — that Barack Obama is not ready to be President.”
Clearly McCain has admiration for Biden’s opinions. So McCain presumably would agree just as vigorously with Biden’s assessment of him.
“John McCain remains wedded to the Bush Administration’s myopic view of a world defined by terrorism […] It’s time for a fundamental change, but that’s going to require more than a great soldier. It’s going to require a wise leader” […] “We cannot keep treading water without exhausting ourselves and more importantly doing great damage to our other vital interests around the world and at home. And that’s exactly what President Bush and a President McCain would be asking us to do.”
Apparently there has been no harsher critic of McCain’s lack of judgment than Joe Biden. McCain can hardly praise Biden’s insight with regard to Obama yet dismiss it with regard to himself. Therefore, McCain must agree that his own world view is myopic, unwise, and damaging to our country’s interests.
McCain’s surrogates on his staff and in the press are also busy spinning the Biden announcement. Most of the criticism falls into two categories:
1) The selection of Biden, with his strong foreign policy credentials, is an admission on the part of Obama that he is weak in those areas.
I’m sure they will apply the same logic when McCain selects, for instance, Mitt Romney, concluding that Romney’s economic skills affirms McCain’s ignorance in financial matters.
2) Biden is gaffe-prone due to his willingness to say whatever is on his mind.
In some circles that is called “straight talk” and is painted on the sides of campaign buses.
There is speculation amongst the pundit class that McCain will shortly have ads on the air featuring Biden saying nasty things about Obama. If I were advising the Obama media team, I would suggest that they do it first – with a touch of humor – and add Biden’s more recent criticisms of McCain. This is the inoculation school of campaign advertising and would take the sting out of McCain’s attempts to exploit remarks made by Biden when he was seeking the party’s nomination himself. And of course, be ready with ads of McCain’s VP choice knocking him down a peg or two. Almost every Republican has in the past year, so it would be easy to compile.
Isn’t politics fun?
I agree with you politics is quite funny. However, eventually the joke is on us.
Unfortunately, we’re stuck with another hold your nose and vote election. The more time rolls on the more Obama looks like the same old, same old. McCain always was the same old, same old.
If you’re a card-carrying, convention-attending member of the Democratic Party Biden is a great pick. Everyone else yawns and says, “Not so great.”
Did you catch Biden’s speech yesterday? Typical career politician rubbish only Biden tends to ramble more than most. So much for change. Will the safe Democratic insider pick convert a single voter over to Obama? Unlikely. We’ll see if his bull-in-a-china-shop-mouth will turn anyone off in the coming months but it’s more than likely.
Why does Obama need a foreign policy ‘expert’ as VP? Mere window dressing? He’ll have the entire State Department at his disposal. Look what happened when an arrogant President Bush sat upon the knee of experienced Uncle Dick and largely ignored the experts at the State Department.
I like Biden but not on Obama’s ticket. There’s zero synergy.
Forgetting good government for a moment (because politics rarely is about it), the biggest threat to Obama politically is the PUMAs who are mad as hell Hillary wasn’t even vetted despite Obama’s disingenuous pandering that she’d be on anybody’s short list.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ll probably end up voting for Obama. The alternative is McCain and I fundamentally disagree with him on several key issues. However, Obama peaked a long time back and is turning what should be an easy Democratic win into a horse race. Mainly because he wasn’t well vetted early on when he built an insurmountable lead in the primaries and because he’s over time morphed into the ubiquitous over-promising, my-message-fits-my-audience pol.
I’m as much a sceptic about politics as anyone – probably more so. I don’t expect spiritual transformations to accompany an Obama presidency. But there is a big difference between him and McCain.
I am hoping that the window dressing of centrism will fall away once he is in office. And one thing that will be revolutionary no matter what, is that we will have broken the color barrier for the White House. Whether Obama will govern as a true progressive or reformer, I don’t know. But he will be different.
By the way, the whole argument that Biden affirms Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience is just plain silly. Republicans have been battering him about that for 18 months. They would continue to do so no matter who he picked for VP. So what’s so bad about having someone who is respected for that skill set? If he had chosen Gov. Kaine they would have bashed for not picking someone more season on foreign affairs – like Biden.
Oh yeah…
PUMAs are not exactly a big threat to anyone. There are about 4 of them. A total joke.
I can’t account for the other 3 but – proof it must be a small world – I know 1 of them.
But then a poll in late June suggests there are a tad more than 4. 11% of the Clinton supporters to be exact. Since that poll Obama’s lead has shrunk to within the margin of error slimness despite the conventional wisdom a generic Democrat trounces a Republican. Can he afford to crap PUMAs away? Even 4 of them?
What kos is missing, IMHO, is the absolute hatred between the Hillary and Obama supporters. I thought whoever won, Obama or Hillary, should have picked the other as VP. Naive me. Suggest that to an Obama supporter and be prepared to have your head taken off cleanly at the shoulder.
Unfortunately, kos overlooks another obvious point in his lame attempt to write them off as “…a bunch of attention whoring cranks.” Lost in his mistaken Howard Dean analogy is the fact PUMAs could gain quite a lot by voting for McCain. Defeating Obama opens the door for Hillary in 2012. 2016 likely will be too late for her though she’d be a couple years younger than McCain is.
Of course, Obama didn’t even consider Hillary. We know Obama’s wife hates the Clintons. She’s on the record as saying she wouldn’t vote for them if Obama didn’t get the nomination. I hear whispers there’s no love lost with Obama either.
Which led him to consider 3 far weaker candidates: Biden, Bayh, and Kaine. Biden is the party insider choice. Kaine and Bayh are weak plays for light blue states and, to some small extent, validations of the change theme.
A more interesting choice is Governor Sebelius. No chance of that with Obama dumping his change theme for his VP pick.
The good news is McCain is likely to choose some boring, unimaginative white male like Romney. However, if he picked someone more interesting like Governor Palin of Alaska who’s insanely popular (80+%) in her home state and has a compelling life story as the mother of a child with Downs Syndrome watch out.
Like you, I think eventually the PUMAs will cool off. The 1 (of 4) I know probably will drop out in the end and not vote. This doesn’t help Obama but it doesn’t hurt him either.
In any case, Obama’s pick, IMHO, approaches the idiotic. The 4 voters you need to count are the one’s who’ll vote for Obama because Biden’s on the ticket. 😉
Biden was not my preferred choice but this afternoon I spoke with a friend who told that his 70+ parents – lifelong Dems – were not going to vote for Obama because of the experience issue. But after he chose Biden they changed their minds. So there are a lo t of scenarios to unfold.
Also, I think virtually every Clinton supporter will end up voting for Obama. In 2000, the percentage of McCain supporters who said they wouldn’t vote for Bush was higher than the Clinton number. But they eventually came back to the fold. This is routine. Hillary’s supporters are Dems and they will not end up voting for someone who is opposed to almost everything they hold dear. Especially when Obama’s agenda is so similar to hers and she is campaigning for him.
Half awake this morning (hadn’t had my 1st cup of coffee) I listened to Cokie Roberts on NPR. If you missed it you might like to visit NPR’s website later today and listen to it. She did a good job covering the Hillary supporters angle (no mention of PUMA by name).
She brought up one point regarding Biden I overlooked. Obama’s getting absolutely trounced in the Catholic vote. Catholics are a bellwether; as they go the country tends to go. Of course, Biden’s Catholic so his pick is transparent pandering to that demographic. It’ll be interesting to see if Obama moves in the polls because Biden is on the ticket. I suspect after the convention bounce fades not so much.
Kos, IMHO, assumes the PUMAs will do what liberal liberals like himself have done for too long: suck down hard and vote for an unattractive (moderate) Democrat because it’s them versus the evil Republicans. Now it’s his time. Let the moderate Democrats choke down and vote for a truely liberal Democrat. IMHO, the flaw here is I don’t think all PUMAs are playing political team sports.
The woman I know is a right leaning independent who was excited that a woman would finally get a realistic shot at president. That’s the change she wants. She was a net gain for the Democrats until Obama stiff armed Hillary and then went a step further by not even considering a woman for VP. She’s completely turned off to Obama now. BTW, she lives in a swing state Obama lusts for.
If McCain – as unlikely as this sounds – picks a woman VP she’ll likely go his way.
A lot of PUMAs, IMHO, are women fed up with male dominated politics in America. The novelty of the first African American male doesn’t excite them very much. Sure, as kos expects, the life-long Democrats in that group will hold their nose and rejoin the ‘team’ but those that aren’t might stay home or vote for McCain.
And, IMHO, there are more than 4 of them but I can only account for 1. For what it’s worth, Cokie appears to agree with me too.
My apologies to Senator McCain. I didn’t think he had the guts to pick Governor Palin though I said she was his best pick:
My hats off to him. The thud you just heard is the Obama campaign falling flat on its face. My PUMA buddy told me tonight she’s flipped into the McCain camp. She thinks her mother has flipped as well.
If Obama loses the election you can trace a large part of his defeat to the absolutely arrogant, stubborn hatred liberal Obama supporters – like your buddy kos – have toward Clinton and her followers. Obama should have swallowed his pride and gone with Hillary as VP but it’s obviously too big a pill to swallow.
The change agent who’s the great uniter that’ll bridge party lines can’t even get along with a large chunk of his own party.
Nobody’s talking about the DNC convention. All the news chatter on the radio tonight was Palin, Palin, Palin. Larry King is covering it tonight.Anderson Cooper is featuring it. You wouldn’t even know the Democrats had a convention.
Palin is a joke. She is under investigation for abuse of office and is tied to indicted, and about to be indicted Alaska pols, Stevens and young. I couldn’t be happier with this pick. It didn’t take guts – it took desperation.
And let me say this carefully…Anyone who purports to be a supporter of Hillary Clinton but now supports McCain/Palin is an IDIOT. How can someone support a pro-choice, anti-Iraq war, alternative energizer, universal healthcare advocate (etc…), and switch to a pro-life, war supporting, drill everywhere, free market healthcare ticket? Either they are too stupid for words or they were never really supporters of Clinton (or her agenda) in the first place.
No real Clinton supporter would vote for McCain/Palin. They are foursquare against everything she stands for. It’s like saying I hate communism but I’m voting for Stalin because he has a nice moustache.
John Amato at Crooks & Liars was ill so he sluffed off convention coverage to the Group News Blog. I point this out because Sara Robinson’s reaction to Obama’s acceptance speech is typical of the starry eyed gushing I’ve heard from Obama supporters throughout the campaign cycle. Obama’s soaring rhetoric strikes a cord with liberal liberals; he’s become the embodiment of their dreams.
Many of the Hillary supporters bolting the party aren’t liberal liberals. They’re mostly women sick and tired of old boy politics.
What’s so different about Obama? While Obama’s African roots are emphasized to promote the historical first black candidate angle, he’s half white. Which is to say, if every president up until now was black, whites would be hailing him as the first white candidate. 😉
My friend who flipped, I believe, is typical. Politically color blind, she just sees him as another man running for president following the well trod tradition of picking another swinging dick as his running mate to keep the fraternity going in the White House.
Politically moderate, strict liberal dogma regarding banning guns, pro-choice activism, saving caribou from oil derricks, etc. don’t trump the importance of breaking the glass ceiling that’s frustrated them their entire lives.
Obama supporters thinks independents amongst Hillary’s supporters are like myself (holding my nose with one hand, I voted for her in the primaries). More afraid of McCain than Obama, they’ll do what I’ll do by voting for Obama holding my nose with both hands.
Swinging dicks like you and I don’t appreciate how absolutely fed up women are with politics as usual – like unequal pay. Liberal liberals such as yourself appear confused that Obama represents real change. This isn’t lost on Hillary supporters bolting the Democrats who realize, correctly in my mind, that Obama is the same old, same old Democratic talking points prettied up with the amazing speechifying abilities of Obama.
While Obama’s acceptance speech was entertaining and, technically, covered point by point what it needed, unlike Sara Robinson, I see not a single new, fresh idea in its 40+ minute girth.
The only possible “idiot” in this picture is a Democrat who can lose an election with so much – everything – in their favor. Let’s just hope Obama doesn’t prove to be that idiot because he hasn’t shown me much since a little past midway in the primaries.
You’re just repeating yourself now. I’ll repeat myself: Your friend is an idiot. She is voting against her own self interest – even as you described it (i.e. equal pay). If she wants to vote for McCain because his lame running mate has a vagina, even though they will work to oppose equal pay and other issues important to women, she’s nuts. Period.
I’m glad that the vast majority of women are not as stupid as your friend.
On Obama, I agree with your assessment of his oratory skills and that that does not necessarily make a good candidate. But by articulating the progressive themes in his lofty speeches he will have a mandate, once elected, to pursue them.
[quote] “…Obama hasn’t shown me much since a little past midway in the primaries…” [/quote]
That’s what you should identify as being a consistant message, unlike Maverick McP.O.Dubya & the hockey MILF (drill drill drill!). 😛
No way.
No how.
No moose burgers.
//Chris
AMERiCA ’08