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Did Obama pick Biden as VP, or Biden wearing Clinton's lipstick, pearls and pantsuit on, hailed as a "fighter" from "Scranton, PA"?
My first reaction to the Biden pick is that Obama must have a pathological grudge against Clinton to go to such lengths to avoid her when he needs her base and the things she could do for him if only she were on his ticket. While it's hard to read between the lines of the well-coordinated propaganda supporting Obama's pick, I think many are dismayed not by the Biden pick, but by the way the Obama campaign seems to dress him up for her voters. Picking Biden in itself makes sense if Obama weren't going to follow through with his risky "transformative change" ticket, and if he weren't going to pick Clinton. But putting Clinton's lipstick, earrings and pearls on him and lauding him up with words interchangeable with Clinton's resurgent campaign seems ghoulishly like that guy in Psycho with his dead mother in the upstairs bedroom.
A spate of unsettled articles today, like Frank Rich's attempt to explain away why Obama has dropped any pretense anymore of being a "change" or "transcendent" "new politics" leader, indicates a broad but subtle falling away from Obama's vision by the more progressive members of his base. They will support him, but they aren't in love with him, anymore. His Biden pick and how he's dressing Biden up as Clinton, is fundamentally at odds with Obama's core message, themes, and marketing of himself, and too creepy a reprise of Clinton.
With his VP pick, Obama's switched from a "change" and "new politics" ticket to an "old politics white senior DC pol who knows what he's teaching the young president" ticket. Obama also compromised his "new politics means I won't take cynical positions" earlier this Summer with a series of flip flops, including breaking his federal election funding pledge and other reversals that surprised the left winger progressives. Obama's deeply negative dive into spouse attacks cements the fall of Obama from the pedestal of his "new politics" rhetoric this Spring. Thus his perfect-worlder rhetoric has met reality, about 3 months after the end of primary season.
Obama won't be forthcoming with new specifics about his transformative "new politics" as his media fans have been suggesting he do since bombing at Saddleback. After his inability to make the "transformative change" "new politics" campaign more specific and substantial this Summer, Obama's suddenly dropped it, reformulating his campaign as an enhanced Hillary Clinton Spring 2008 one.
Let's look now at the subject of the game-changing everyone knew Obama needed. Obama's now going to fight for the middle on substantive debates over issues. There are problems with Obama starting a new campaign and pose as Hillary Clinton this late in the election, but let's ignore that for now. Biden will do foreign affairs and politics stuff and handle the blue collar appeal. It's my guess that Obama will tackle the economy and the post-convention campaign will be an attack on the Bush economy and McCain's weaknesses there. While Obama has made some missteps in unveiling his reformulation of his campaign that is a reprise of Hillary's, his post-convention campaign will definitely be more issue-focused and more substantive than that which went before.
It's my feeling, going forward, that McCain will have to fight a campaign on several fronts: attacks from Biden in foreign affairs and political matters and a campaign against the Bush economy and McCain's economic and social programs from Obama. If (or WHEN) the energy supply/demand problem rears its ugly head, McCain and Obama will be battling there, too.
This brings to the fore another interesting strength in Obama's new substance campaign: McCain continues to struggle with the right wing in attempts to pivot to the center in an election year where the whole country is swept with anti-Republican sentiment. The fact is that McCain spends more time arguing and defending and fighting with his base on litmus test issues in which the right wing remains entrenched in some deeply unpopular stands than he spends getting effective messages out about his great energy platform, for example, and Obama's poised to hit him right at that issue-focus weakness.
Indeed, with his campaign reformulation, Obama is shifting the battleground to those areas in which McCain is fighting the right ideologues on his flank, every day. This is a potentially critical problem for McCain, as he continues to be pinned down both from the "McJeering" left and the passive aggressive right wingers on energy, climate change, economic and other platform fronts.
One last point: whether this new Obama package is worth electing. Why not just elect Clinton or McCain, instead of a high-powered, dressed up lightweight imitation of an experienced, substantial, ready-to-lead centrist? So many times, excellent, prepared centrists get pushed aside during primary season, so that the general election's a choice between the lesser of two evils.
In some election years it makes sense to elect the party and not the person. I believe that this decade, "change" will be forced on us whether we want it or not. Our country, in order to face and deal with the changes that global growth and environmental dislocations are forcing on us, will need a bipartisan, pragmatic independent thinker with depth of experience, clear thinking tendencies and freedom from ideological impulses. Fortunately, there is a candidate like that being nominated this year.
For the last 8 years Democrats wished that, instead of the ideological and lightweight Bush who had dressed himself up as a centrist for the general election and posited the vague notion of a "compassionate conservative", McCain had instead won the 2000 Republican primary. Well, McCain did win the primary this year. I'd rather be voting for Clinton this Fall, but if I can't, I'll vote for McCain, the next best -- real -- pragmatic centrist candidate ready to lead.
