Kevin Drum offers Barack Obama some truly craptacular running mate advice.
I don’t have a brief one way or the other for Biden — though he certainly fits the traditional loudmouth-attack-dog-who-says-things-the-president-can’t-say profile pretty well — but this objection doesn’t seem right. Once he leaves the cozy confines of a primary where the anti-war base is enough to win, Obama is going to enter the chillier territory of a general election where he’ll need to draw a bunch of votes from the ranks of people who once supported the war. He needs a good way to signal these folks that he doesn’t consider them tainted forever by their erstwhile support, and what better way than by choosing a moderately hawkish senator who once favored the war but has since changed his mind? The opposite tack — insisting that he’ll associate only with the pure of heart who opposed the war from the beginning — would be something of a disaster. People won’t vote for a candidate who tacitly seems to be calling them idiots.
This is just a variation on the ‘serious person’ argument. Only people who were for the war can be president or vice-president (in this case) because people don’t like to be reminded that they are effing stupid, or because they don’t trust people that do not use military force first and ask questions later.
Run on your superior judgment in opposing the war and then make your first major decision picking a running mate that voted for the war.
Seriously, Kevin, WTF?
