Life in the reality warp...

[jducoeur]

I seem to be the only person I know who actually rather likes the choice of Biden as VP nominee. It's smart on a lot of levels, adding someone who I think provides good balance to the ticket, and even more importantly balance to the potential Administration. No, it's not the choice that the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party would have chosen -- which is exactly why I approve, and exactly why it was smart. Yes, he's a Washington insider -- *someone* had damned well better be, if they want to get things done. I may want refom, but it's only going to happen if they know how to work the system, very effectively; otherwise, they'll just get steamrollered by the entrenched interests.

And frankly, this afternoon's speeches were fun to watch. Biden definitely isn't the beautiful speech-maker that Obama is (he certainly lived up to his reputation there), but he had fire and spirit and the willingness to be politely ruthless that is absolutely needed if they're going to win in November. It was what I wanted to hear; moreover, it was what I *expected* to hear. Everyone's been fretting about "Oh, my god -- McCain is catching up in the polls!" Of *course* he was -- he's gone on the hard offensive, while the Obama campaign played rope-a-dope for a while. I think that ended today, with a Biden speech that was uncompromising, full of delicious sound-bites, and frankly made some damned good points.

One thing that only occurred to me today: the Democrats have just hurt Romney's chances of getting the VP nod. Their message was substantially focused on painting McCain as rich and out-of-touch, contrasting with two Democrats who come from much less exalted circumstances. Romney would just make that contrast worse -- not just two white guys, but two very *rich* white guys. The Democrats would be all over that, and I have to expect that the Republicans know that it's a danger...

Comments

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

You have an excellent point.

But I think McCain would have been nuts to pick Romney anyway.

I suppose he's gonna lose Massachusetts anyway, but that would cinch it.

Romney's religion is as big an issue as Obama's race, McCain's age and Biden being an older white guy.

McCain has to go outside the box now. If he picked Jindal, I would vote for him. But he can't, because it would alienate his party.

[calygrey.livejournal.com]

I suppose he's gonna lose Massachusetts anyway, but that would cinch it.

Has Massachusetts ever gone Republican?

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

I am sure it has at some point,

But I do remember in 1974 or so seeing "Don't blame me. I'm from Massachusetts" bumper stickers.

If McCain picks Romney, the entire state might vote for Obama.

[calygrey.livejournal.com]

In 1974 we were the single state to *not* vote for Nixon.

Reagan, we voted for Reagan. Twice. Here's a cool website with election results going back nearly forever: http://uselectionatlas.org/

[calygrey.livejournal.com]

....1972 that is.

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

Right.

That is the bumper sticker I was talking about, which came out in 1974.

[jducoeur]

Yaas. I may dislike McCain's policies rather badly (and my lingering respect for him has been pretty well shattered by his pandering to the right wing). But I despise Romney with a passion that is hard to express...

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

Ya know, Justin, we don't always agree on some topics, but we are together on Romney. ;)

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

My dislike of Romney is very gut-level. Yes, yes, they're all politicians, but Romney just strikes me as the ultimate slime-ball opportunist backslapper who would disembowel his grandmother if it got him a vote.

But still, there are a great many who don't share my view, and McCain/Romney would be a powerful ticket.

[jducoeur]

Oh, definitely. Fortunately, it would also be a vulnerable one...

[ckd]

In 1984, Reagan managed to win every state but Minnesota (Mondale also took DC). That's the most recent time Massachusetts has gone R.

Running mate

[new-man.livejournal.com]

A good choice for McCain would be Sarah Palin, the current governor of Alaska. She's young, female, and republican. And popular in her home state -- which doesn't count for much...

A second choice might be Judy Martz the former governor of Montana, ex-Olympic skater and Miss Rodeo Montana. If he just wanted to go populist ;-)

Re: Running mate

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

I think both of them as a vice president would be great, so long as Palin doesn't get caught in the Ted Stevens' mess.

But would a woman fly politically?

Re: Running mate

[new-man.livejournal.com]

I think that a female VP would go a long way to counter some of the New! Different! edge that Obama has, without going so far as to alienate the bulk of the Republican party.

It might even pull some swing voters over to the Republican side -- including some of those passionate Clinton supporters who are looking for a place to go.

Re: Running mate

[jducoeur]

Yes, that's possible. The difficulty there will actually be a subtle one: they need a VP candidate who won't upstage McCain, and some of the female candidates might do so. If McCain chooses a running mate who makes him look *too* much like a kindly grandfather, it could backfire on him badly. His image is predicated on strength, and he can't afford to undercut that. So I don't consider a female running mate impossible, but he'll have to be careful about his choice and how the relationship works.

This relates to a problem with Romney that my mother pointed out to me yesterday: he's too *tall*. If you look at McCain and Romney together, McCain looks downright tiny, and that would be really, really bad for him. One of the points she made about Biden that hadn't even occurred to me is that he is almost exactly the same height as Obama, which is what you want in terms of visuals, and visuals matter...

[serakit.livejournal.com]

Why, exactly, is it such a big deal that Romney is a Mormon? I can see not liking him because he's an idiot, but because he's a Mormon?

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

The same big deal that Obama is Black and McCain is so old.

It will be the deciding factor for a number of voters.

I think Romney's religion is a major issue, especially among Conservative Christians, who share his recent views but not his religion.

I have no issue with his religion.

But he was a horrible governor, so there's no way I vote for a ticket that includes him.

[jducoeur]

Remember, things are different among the most stridently religious. To a lot of Christian Fundamentalists, Mormons aren't just infidels, they're *heretics* -- preaching a corrupt version of Christianity. It's very common for heresy to be considered a lot worse than mere non-belief...

[johno.livejournal.com]

Part of the VP candidates job is to be the attack dog. Obama can now get back to talking about change and his plans, while Biden can do all the nasty talk.

[jducoeur]

Yaas, and he was doing that quite effectively yesterday. And it's another reason why he works so well. McCain has been pulling a smarmy but fairly effective "I'm older and more experienced than you, so I know better" against Obama; due to America's underlying attitudes about age vs. youth, Obama can't effectively counter without sounding churlish. But he just plain can't do that against Biden, who can match or better him credential-for-credential, and has the cred to talk very frankly about McCain...

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

There are a number of things I like about Biden. At the top of the list is the fact that he owns one (1) house, in his home district. Since that's Delaware, it's close enough to DC that her commutes. On Amtrak.

[laurion]

I think Biden's a smart choice as well. Connects with blue collar workers, originally from PA (swing state), plenty of inside experience and military grounding.

Considering the Reps. pushed Bush as the 'president you'd most want to drink a beer with' in the past few elections, I'm really not surprised that the Dems are turning the tables and painting McCain that way; especially as it further distances him from their populous base. Big Business may be the economic help the Republicans need, but it won't get them the Joe Sixpack votes. That's why they used the 1-2 combination of Bush and Cheney to get both sides.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I also think Biden's an excellent choice: A guy with a compelling personal story and tons experience who's gone to work on public transit every day for the last 35 years (though presumably that stopped yesterday). What choice would have been better for defusing any claim that the Democratic ticket is inexperienced and elitist?

[madamebuttery.livejournal.com]

The problem with Biden's "compelling personal story" is that it's not always the same one. The man is a known plagiarist, including once substituting someone else's personal biography for his own. On the other hand, Obama can make anyone sound good. His introduction of Biden made him (Biden) sound better than he ever had when giving his own qualifications.

[new-man.livejournal.com]

I don't know a lot about Biden, but I have to admit my initial reaction was a negative one. I think it's a poor political choice for a lot of the reasons you think it's a good choice.

Obama's been losing his base. There are a lot of people who saw him as this great reformer, and every step he's taken towards the middle has disillusioned them and -- in some cases -- just made them say "Screw it; this is all politics as usual and not voting for anyone". I don't know if Obama-as-Outsider was a political strategy that would have ultimately carried the day, but I can certainly credit it as the initial reason why people were excited about him.

Biden doesn't balance out Obama's ticket. They're both intellectual liberals from Northeastern states (yes, I know Obama grew up in a variety of places and is currently a resident of Chicago, on the other hand, the place he seems to be associated with most is Harvard). Obama would be wise to stay away from the "rich and out of touch" line of attack; it's ludicrous to see two men who each are in the top 10% of American wealth slugging it over who has less money as an indication of their knowledge of the 'common man'.

[jducoeur]

While that's true, it was also inevitable and necessary. Nobody *ever* wins the White House by pandering just to their base. Even the Republican hegemony of the past decade was constructed by convincing the center that they were the relatively "normal" party -- de-emphasizing their own extremes during general elections, and painting the Democrats as left-wing extremists.

There was no way that Obama could please his base and win, because the base would *only* be happy with someone who was as much of a young outsider as himself. And the general public would look at that and fall to the easy McCain argument that these were nice people, but too inexperienced in how things actually work to get business done. (And a little too "weird" to trust.) He had to pick someone much closer to the center than himself to have a solid chance, and the left wing would bitch and moan about *anyone* closer to the center.

And frankly, I think that the despair about his support is wildly overdone: it's easy to despair, but it's also incorrect. I mean, a good barometer of the *big* base -- not the tiny fringe, but the mass of his likely supporters -- is probably my mother. She hasn't been enthusiastic about a candidate in *decades*; she had largely felt abandoned by politics. But she has become an ardent supporter of Obama, working on the campaign and sending every penny she can afford to. I was with her yesterday, and she was overjoyed at the idea of Biden as the VP pick: he was the only one of the options who she considered viable. She'd been quite scared that Obama was going to choose poorly, and strongly of the opinion that he chose right.

So is Obama going to lose a few votes because of young voters who won't accept any "old white guy"? Sure, a few who don't remember the Nader disaster. But he will pick up *far* more from my mother's demographic -- which is mostly made up of Hillary supporters who needed some reassurance that this ticket is going to have someone who understands them.

And as for "northern intellectuals", you're not paying attention to the mythologizing. The message is being very carefully crafted from the word go: they're not making the usual Democratic mistake of allowing the Republicans to define them. They've already started that, very aggressively, making sure that everyone knows that Biden is from a working-class background, a guy who isn't all that rich, who commuted from Washington back to his home state every night so he could take care of his children. Are there holes in that myth? Of course there are -- anybody can be made to look bad without all that much effort. But they are making Biden out to be a normal guy, right from the starting gate, and aren't going to casually allow the other side to define him otherwise this time. Frankly, they're painting him as far more of a populist than he actually is, which is *fine* positioning, and I think the Republicans are going to find themselves scrambling to do much about that...

[new-man.livejournal.com]

My feeling is (and it's just a feeling), the Republicans want to win and they don't really care which individual or personality wins, a slong as it's not a Democrat. Democrats, by and large, want their candidate to win, and "their" candidate could be Hilary Clinton (Ms. Clinton still has a huge amount of support for her candidacy -- especially for someone who's not a candidate) or the Barack Obama they fell in love with. The centrist Obama loses the support of the people who brought him to the attention of the country ("You've changed, man"). When Obama drew support by embracing change, the people who supported him didn't think that 'change' was going to apply to their candidate.

So the question is, will the bump from Biden exceed the losses? I don't know. You seem to think so.

I'm not sure that we can have the two sides of Biden. Either, he's a down-to-earth guy with strong family values who takes mass transit every day (to balance out Obama's "elitist intellectual"), or he's the savvy Washington insider, who balances out Obama's lack of experience. Yes, I realize that an actual human being can be both of these things – but the media at election time is going to look for a single label to pin on Biden, the way they do with everyone else. I think the best Biden can hope for is something like "The Balancinator"; something which acknowledges that he's managed to be a family man while maintaining a long political career. The challenge there is that if something comes along which compromises one aspect, it manages to compromise the other by association. If we discover that Biden has had an affair (attacking the 'family' side of his equation), his political experience also suffers. It's not logical, but it'll happen.

[jducoeur]

Oh, absolutely, but a scandal would destroy pretty much anybody, so I don't tend to worry about that. "Balancinator" would be, frankly, a perfectly fine image to wind up with -- the center of the country (which is really where the election will hang) is deeply sick of partisan bickering, so if Biden comes across as basically a down-to-earth centrist technocrat, that will appeal to a lot of people. (Including myself.) Indeed, I don't think the two aspects are entirely in tension: the up-by-the-bootstraps story is one that resonates very deeply with middle America, and Biden can tell that story nicely -- they're painting him as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, essentially. Yes, Obama was already telling that story, but Obama is a little weird to Middle America, whereas Biden frankly *looks* like someone they can relate to.

So in general -- yeah, I really do think that the positives from Biden will be significantly greater than the negatives. I'd worry more if we were looking at a credible third-party threat from the left that might seriously split the party, but I'm really not seeing that this time. Indeed, this time around it's the Republicans who are desperately scared of a split -- if Barr really does poll 7% in some states, as a few polls have indicated, it could really Nader them.

Biden will be resented by the passionate left because he's safe, but he's not *so* much a company man as to entirely counteract Obama -- Obama/Biden is still the most progressive ticket since at least Mondale/Ferraro, and looks a lot better-grounded in reality. Yeah, some of the extreme left who took Obama for a messiah will be disillusioned, but reality was going to punch them in the face pretty soon anyway: they're looking for a revolution, and Obama is not (and really hasn't claimed to be) a revolutionary. He's mostly about smart, steady incremental improvement, and if he's going to carry the center he has to be clear about that.

So the question for the hard left becomes: do you make the best the enemy of the good? They've done so frequently in the past, but I think the hunger to end the Republican horror show is deep enough this time to mostly keep things together. And I think that at least the sensible progressives will recognize that it's better for them to support a moderate progressive like Obama, rather than continue to cut off their noses to spite their face...

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

I'm firmly in the progressive wing, and I'm okay with Biden. He doesn't excite me, but excitement was the area Obama had firmly covered. There are people I would have liked better, but he's better than almost anyone who was seriously talked about in the past couple of weeks. His support of the bankruptcy bill was heinous, but overall his positions and the things he's worked for in the Senate have been quite good.

My friend Jane Hamsher (http://firedoglake.com/2008/08/24/denver-let-the-madness-begin/) writes from Denver that a gathering of bloggers 'agreed there was something to be said for a guy who united people behind a rallying cry of "at least it's not..."' ;-)

[dreda.livejournal.com]

Hmm - I think it's a very smart choice, and I'm pleased.