What the heck, let’s have a Biden thread.<\/p>\n
Kathy at The G Spot<\/a>, although pointing out Biden’s positives — such as VAWA — has some reasons progressives should be unhappy:<\/p>\n Biden’s record on choice is weak. He’s nominally pro-choice, but he supported the ban on so-called “partial birth” abortions, opposes public funding for abortion, and received a none-too-encouraging rating of 60% from NARAL last year. But what concerns me even more are his votes in favor of limiting the estate tax and “reforming” bankruptcy law. The bankruptcy bill, in particular, was an abomination, and his vote in favor of it was unconscionable. That bill will ruin peoples’ lives — in fact, I’m sure it has already. I’ve heard the rationale that since Biden is from Delaware, he’s “the senator from MBNA” by default, but I don’t buy that excuse. Does anyone really think Biden, who’s held his senate seat for longer than most Americans have been alive, would have suddenly become politically vulnerable if he’d voted differently? I doubt it. It’s not like opposing the bill would have been unpopular with the voters.<\/p>\n Then there’s a whole other issue — call it, the asshole factor. Biden is a hothead and a blowhard, and he’s well-known for his habit of making gaffes and unfortunate remarks. Here are some of his greatest hits:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (You’ll have to click through to Kathy’s<\/a> to read the greatest hits!)<\/p>\n Meanwhile Ezra argues<\/a> that the choice of Biden should please progressives:<\/p>\n For progressives, this is encouraging pick. More encouraging than Bayh, or Kaine, or even, in a way, Sebelius. More encouraging than picks who might have been more progressive, but less pugnacious. Elevating Biden suggests that the Obama campaign has decided to have an argument. Not try to win on momentum and inspiration and GOTV, but to engage, and win, an argument about which set of ideas is better for the future of the country. And in Biden, they’ve engaged at the point of greatest vulnerability and opportunity for Democrats: National security.<\/p>\n A political history of the past few years in Democratic politics is a history of the party’s failed attempts to dance away from foreign policy discussions. There was the Thomas Frank school of thought: Pivot from “national security to economic insecurity.” There was the George Lakoff approach: Reframe the language. There was the Kerry approach: “How can they be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them in Boise?” But even if these approaches had succeeded — they didn’t — they would still have bespoke long-term weakness in the Democratic Party: A fundamental inability to win arguments about American foreign policy.<\/p>\n A Democrat has not been elected during wartime in over 50 years. A healthy party cannot only prosper when the world is at peace and the waters are quiet. But seven years of Republican incompetence and failure have generated tremendous mistrust in the conservative foreign policy approach. Iraq was a historic blunder, Osama bin Laden is loose, America’s international standing is dismal. There’s an opening for Democrats to press the advantage, argue that they, in fact, have the better record, and the sounder ideas, on national security. But they have to actually engage the argument. They can’t hope that events will do the work for them. Picking Biden, the Obama campaign signaled that this is a project they want to take on, and a project they realize will have to be engaged affirmatively and aggressively.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I think both Kathy and Ezra make good cases, and in my usual wishy-washy fashion I agree with them both. But it’s D-Day<\/a> who wrote something that had me screaming “yes! SO true!” at my computer monitor: ((Well, not really. But somewhere inside, I screamed it.))<\/p>\n Actually, who betrayed the public is you, the media, again, because you just couldn’t stand not being insiders for ten minutes and waiting out the pick and maybe using those resources of staking out potential candidates’ homes and working the phones on, I don’t know, illegal wars and torture. The press only breaks out their investigative skills every four years so they can scoop their competition by 20 seconds. Would it have killed them to embargo the story and let the campaign play it out the way they wanted? Would it have mattered to anyone?<\/p>\n This secret was so tantalizing to them, making it necessary to marshal the full resources of the American media, while eight years of secret government and secret law received no such attention. The discovery of the pick was an end in itself, justifying their clubby, insider self-images as the coolest kids in the room. And then, after they’ve undermined the rollout, they blame the candidate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Curtsy: Auguste<\/a>. (And see here <\/a>for more well-earned press-bashing.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What the heck, let’s have a Biden thread. Kathy at The G Spot, although pointing out Biden’s positives — such as VAWA — has some reasons progressives should be unhappy: Biden’s record on choice is weak. He’s nominally pro-choice, but … Continue reading