I guess I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was at 3:30 a.m. Saturday when I found out that Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama picked Joe Biden as his running mate, but I was.
Obama picked an old white guy. An old white guy who hasn’t ever seemed to like Obama much.
Nothing new, right? How many mean, old, white vice presidential picks have there been since America’s conception? More than a hundred, at least. This is precisely the problem.
Obama’s selection of Biden will almost certainly cause a rise in the polls and may end up securing him the election. Biden brings a lot of things to the campaign: age, experience – especially with foreign relations, respect, stability and, dare I say, whiteness. In other words, Biden fills almost every hole in Obama’s campaign. But he doesn’t represent Obama’s original campaign message, which called for “change” in government and society. Biden is old news. He has a lot of less exciting ideas. We know how he will vote and what he will say. He represents the continuance of sameness in our country. Where did Obama’s integrity go?
Biden was elected to the Senate in 1972, meaning he has spent 34 years in Washington. During those 34 years he has pushed some good legislation, such as the Violence Against Women Act of the 1990s, which has helped protect thousands of women. But it represents a moderate protection, and none of the issues discussed on Biden’s Web site are anything exciting. In fact, they’re nothing more than exactly representative of the same liberal ideas that have been discussed for years. The push for, nay, the concept of “Change” is missing.
Biden has become the respected chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in that 34-year period. This is a very good thing for Obama’s campaign. Obama’s (near) lack of experience in foreign relations made him an easy target for talking heads, political analysts and other political figures to attack.
Biden himself had an opinion on the matter. The Wall Street Journal reported that, in August 2007, Biden said that choosing a nominee with no “unimpeachable credentials on national security and foreign policy [would be] a tragic mistake.” And, in that same month he said “the presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.”
Ouch. Statements like the above lessen the possibility that the public will ever believe that Obama and Biden actually like each other or will ever have good chemistry. This makes me wonder why Obama chose Biden. Could it be true that Obama realized his shortcomings, that “Change” was a great piece of rhetoric, but that it would never fly at the polls that he really is just too inexperienced for the job of president of the United States?
I’m starting to think he did realize that, and, instead of standing by those statements about changing America – the ones that fired up millions of people, especially young people – he is stepping down from his position as the new generation’s candidate and blending in with every other presidential candidate America has seen. It seems that Obama has sold himself out in the interest of getting elected.
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