Obama-Biden, Monday morning edition
Well, it’s been 48 hours since the world learned that Barack Obama was going with Delaware Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate.
(As an aside, I want you to know that I NEVER DID get that text message from Obama that was supposed to make me one of “the first to know.“ I actually found out from CNN’s John King just before 1 a.m. Saturday. I did, however, get an e-mail from Barack ... at 9:15 a.m., fully six and a quarter hours after his campaign sent the text message confirming the news. I wonder: Did the campaign have technical difficulties with its new database? Or did it just purge the numbers it couldn’t match with donors to ensure that only supporters are on the list? The latter wouldn’t be a bad idea.)
Anyway, the pick seems to have most Democrats and Republicans alike scratching their heads. On one hand, it doesn’t seem surprising in hindsight that Obama would go with someone like himself: After all, Biden is a blustery fellow who is known for his—shall we say, expansive oratorical reputation. We got a glimpse of that in Biden’s speech on Saturday. But on the other hand, the pick seemed to befuddle Democrats who appeared to have trouble explaining it—especially when John McCain’s campaign was at the ready with an ad using Biden’s own words against Obama and complimenting McCain.
As to the most notable objection to Biden’s selection, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano gave the best retort I’ve heard to how a candidate of change can credibly run with a candidate who’s spent 35 years in the Senate:
Oh, this is the way I interpret it, which is Obama is perfectly capable of effecting change. And what he is doing is picking someone to be with him that can help him accomplish that change.
And someone who can help him accomplish that change is someone like Senator Biden, who’s been chair of two of the most influential committees in the Senate, who is very knowledgeable in the fields of foreign relations, in particular, to help him accomplish the change that he seeks.
Well put. But I still don’t know whether that explanation will fly. I tend to agree with Ron Fournier’s analysis for the Associated Press:
The picks say something profound about Obama: For all his self-confidence, the 47-year-old Illinois senator worried that he couldn’t beat Republican John McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack. The Biden selection is the next logistical step in an Obama campaign that has become more negative - a strategic decision that may be necessary but threatens to run counter to his image.
CNN’s Ed Hornick writes that Obama’s selection of Biden brings “old-school cred” (credibility) to the ticket. But that statement seems to hinge on Biden’s chairmanships of the Senate Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees and his criticisms of the Bush Administration’s foreign policies—“most notably the war in Iraq,“ Hornick writes—even though Biden voted for that war.
I’ve held off on writing about this because I wanted to give myself some time to digest the pick before I went off analyzing it on the blog. So after watching the roll-out for myself on Saturday and hearing folks from all sides on different cable TV channels and reading stuff on the web and thinking about it myself, I have to give the Biden selection ...
... a C-minus.
On the plus side, Obama gets that foreign relations experience that everyone has complained he lacks. But the weight of that “experience” is countered by the fact that Biden, while he’s chaired those committees and questioned witnesses and (presumably) had access to national security information—including intelligence—he still voted for the War in Iraq.
Here’s why that’s a big deal: Obama’s dig against McCain (and, incidentally, against Hillary Clinton in the primary) was that even though they had more years in the Senate than he did, he had better judgment than they did when it came to Iraq. Judgment trumps experience, Obama said, and Obama had better judgment, McCain’s and Clinton’s experience notwithstanding.
Now Obama is running with someone who actually has more experience than McCain, yet still demonstrated the same judgment as McCain?
So which is it, Obama? Judgment or experience? You’re giving us mixed signals here.
And to that point, I think it’s worth noting that the Obama-Biden ticket boasts exactly zero executive experience. It’s one thing to sit on a committee and ask questions, or to take a government-funded trip to another part of the world, or to hold press conferences to attack America’s foreign policy. It’s something else entirely to have to appoint those people who are questioned, to make those policies that are critiqued and to have to make those decisions yourself.
It may be that the McCain ticket ends up with no executive experience (if McCain picks odds-on favorite and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, it won’t)—and if it does, it will be worth mentioning again.
If we’re just looking at demographics (and you know how much I hate doing this—it’s like a science project), Biden does give Obama help with working-class white Catholic voters in places like Pennsylvania and West Virginia and Michigan and Ohio and all the other places where Clinton wiped Obama out, sometimes by 40 points or more. But, again, while Biden presumably shores up the North, he isn’t going to help at all in the South.
Did you know that until Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue was sworn in in January 2003, the Peach State hadn’t had a Republican governor since 1872? No, that’s not a typo—it really had been since 1872. And North Carolina’s current governor, Mike Easley, is a Democrat; the Tarheel State has only had three GOP chiefs since January 1877.
I only say that to say, you can’t capitalize on opportunities like those—you can’t make Georgia and North Carolina competitive—with a guy like Joe Biden, even if he is from Scranton, Pa.
Finally, with regard to Saturday’s roll-out, I have to give it a C-minus, as well. (I would go with the dreaded D designation, but, hey—the weather was good.) Obama’s speech was all over the map. He did a fairly good job of delineating Biden’s personal story, but he never did seem comfortable or seem to find his groove. And what was with him slipping up and introducing Biden as “the next president ... vice president of the United States?“ That sort of slip is completely uncharacteristic of Obama, and that reinforces the notion that there was something amiss that kept him from being able to relax.
And then you had Biden himself. His one great moment Saturday was the line about how McCain didn’t have to sit around the kitchen table wondering about his budget; McCain’s hardest decision is “which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at,“ he said to raucous applause. And the pundits have acknowledged that Obama has in Biden a willing and quite capable attack dog. But from the moment he appeared from his self-imposed exile after receiving the call from Obama Thursday night that he was the guy, he just seemed to be trying too hard to fit. He jogged up the stairs and across the platform. He crowed about how “drop-dead gorgeous” his wife, Jill, is. (Sweet, yes; appropriate, no.) He referred to Obama as “Barack America,“ for goodness’ sake. That’s not going to help people who are already concerned about Obama’s perceived Obama-centric ego.
I read Dana Milbank’s Washington Post piece from back in 2006 where Milbank documented the boredom that permeated the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings on Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court. When it was his turn to question the justice-to-be (Alito’s confirmation was all but assured), Biden blabbered on and on, asking but one lone question in the first 12 minutes of his allotted 30. For all his opposition to a filibuster, Biden ended up filibustering—himself.
And then there was that day last year when Biden himself announced for president. You would think that a guy known as much for talking as Biden is would be right at home with the press on the day when it is all about him. Alas, no; Biden found himself backtracking on his remarks about Obama and even calling his rival to apologize—and all this before the sun had set on his very first day in the race.
This has to have become one of the most oft-repeated passages on the Web this weekend, but I think there’s a good reason for it: Peggy Noonan wrote about Biden in the midst of those Alito hearings:
The great thing about Joe Biden during the Alito hearings, the reason he is, to me, actually endearing, is that as he speaks, as he goes on and on and spins his long statements, hypotheticals, and free associations—as he demonstrates yet again, as he did in the Roberts hearings and even the Thomas hearings, that he is incapable of staying on the river of a thought, and is constantly lured down tributaries from which he can never quite work his way back—you can see him batting the little paddles of his mind against the weeds, trying desperately to return to the river but not remembering where it is, or where it was going. I love him. He’s human, like a garrulous uncle after a drink.
Noonan meant her comments as a compliment of sorts. She could not have known it then, but she may have provided the best description of the iceberg that now looms before Obama’s titanic ambition.
The bottom line is that, as Fournier said, Joe Biden talks too much. In handicapping the ticket this weekend, one pundit estimated that there will be four separate times in the next 11 weeks when Biden will “open mouth, insert foot.“ (I wonder if these odds-makings will turn into some secret drinking game among national political reporters and watchers.)
Isn’t there some irony in the possibility that, for all the shine and glamour and the almost other-worldliness quality Barack Obama and his grand speeches have elicited, his campaign for the White House could be derailed by a well-meaning but clumsy-tongued sidekick?
