If Barack Obama had picked Evan Bayh as his running mate and then had gone on to win the election, Bayh would have set up a little DLC-annex in the Naval Observatory, where staffers from The New Republic would become speechwriters and where neo-conservatives could gather to plot a palace coup. It would have been awful. The only thing worse would have been a Clinton Camp filled with people like Lanny Davis, Paul Begala, and Mark Penn.
How different would either of those scenarios have been from ones with outsider governors Tim Kaine or Kathleen Sebelius at the helm? They would have brought in a team of nobodies from fairly conservative states. Biden is different.
Biden has a big loyal clan but he doesn’t belong in any particular ideological faction of the party. He’s never been a state rep or governor of Delaware, so he doesn’t have a home state mafia to move in with him. Biden has two real blocs of support. One, obviously, is the national political media. The other is the foreign policy elite of the Senate. Biden is as at home working with Sens. Lugar, Warner, and Hagel as he is with any Democrat. They all see the Cheney people as dangerous interlopers and they all see McCain as someone that has gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd. Political considerations may prevent Lugar and Hagel from flat-out endorsing an Obama-Biden ticket, but I’ll bet anything that they will vote for them in the privacy of the voting booth. In fact, they’d probably be willing to serve in an Obama-Biden administration.
And that’s something valuable for an incoming administration. Obama talks a lot about the need for a new kind of politics that gets beyond petty political differences. Some of it is just happy talk. But on foreign policy, Obama has a real chance to do what he is talking about. The selection of Biden is a nod in the direction of the foreign policy realists. The people that have spent the last 40 years serving on the National Security Council and in the State Department are ecstatic about this pick regardless of which party they personally self-identify with.
Now, there’s also a warning in here. If you were looking for a really transformative foreign policy you are probably going to be disappointed. But the system can only take so much change at any given time. The overthrow of the Clintons, coming at the end of the complete crack-up of the Republican Party, is quite enough change for the nation’s power brokers, thank you. Any real change will come from presidential leadership, anyway.
Biden had the great line today about McCain’s 7 kitchens, but my favorite, a slip up, was “Barack America.” Nice ring to it.
I agree that the powers-that-be will only allow so much change to happen at any one time. Unfortunately, “they” will probably be more restrained with Obama/DLC/Dem Congress since “they” allowed the rapid-fire changes of the neocons and “Free Market” capitalists over the last 7+ years to send our nation straight towards a totalitarian economico-profit-at-any-expense free for all which is eating away our nation. >gasp<
I guess it’s been ok to oppress people and destroy our nation’s pride for the riches and power of the very very very few, but even as center-right as Obama seems to be heading, the “they” won’t let him and his administration get very far. I say forget health care reform. I say forget a full exit from Iraq. I say watch another 4 to 8 years of waiting for green energy policies to be backed by the federal government. I say watch for continued escalation of fighting in Afganistan. I say watch the sabre-rattling with Russia amplify, casting the old cold war spell on the US populace again. I say watch the War (Defense) Department become not only more bloated with spending, but slyly become the US’s real shadow government. The neocon/Milton Friedman agenda is not just the agenda of Cheney/Rumsfeld, but has won a lot of other believers over the last 7+ years. Their new profits and power reflect the success of that agenda, and Dem or Rep, the powerbrokers love to jump on the most profitable bandwagons.
In other words, expect business as usual.
So Biden is good for Obama’s image, to help him get elected. Ok. I get that, I even support that. But when the sh*t hits the fan, when the nation’s economic house of cards collapses into the sand that it was built into, what then? Will Obama turn to Wall Street, the very criminals that perpetrated our economic folly to bail him out? Or to some image of a president, Joe Biden, hawkish, likes to spend $$ on offensive weaponry and graft. What happens when the neocons knock off Obama and Biden can’t handle the presidency in the midst of a depression? He’s going to spend his way out of the disaster?
I think Biden is very good for Obama’s ticket, for his victory, but is again, NO CHANGE for the 99% of us. When will we ever learn the easy way . . . ?
What do you mean, “the system can only take so much change at one time”? What about George fuckin’ Bush and the last eight years ?
Well, Bush broke the system, which is why Obama had an opening and the Clintons took the fall.
Well,
Just saying, the system has unlimited, or certainly untested, capacity for good change. Think if Bush had been investing in infrastructure, public transportation, distributed solar. I feel that by saying it does not, it sets up a self fulfilling prophecy situation and makes it that much harder to discuss real, deep, diverse change in a way that’s empowering to real change.
The cracks had been implemented by every administration since Reagan. It’s just that the 900 lb gorilla, Cheney, sat on the cracks and broke the structure. Not that the structure wasn’t flawed already . . .
If you want CHANGE, then you have to give Obama the tools for CHANGE, which means larger margins in the House and as close to 60 in the Senate as possible.
If you want change, you have to force change. Obama will be as good a president for we the people as we make him be. No better.
Thank you!
I remember months ago someone saying that Hillary would “lead us out of the darkness”. I replied that no one, not Hillary, not Obama, not Jesus would lead you out of the darkness, that it was up to YOU to take yourselves out of the darkness. This is one of the problems with the American mentality. They wait for a leader to lead them, and when that leader heads straight for the highest cliff, the majority blindly follow while the rest look for another leader to lead them toward the next cliff.
We must take responsibility, we must take the bull by the horns and do it for ourselves. We need cooperation and support and some good luck, and we have to learn to stop respecting wealth so much that it cripples us from feeling that there’s no way to fight for what’s right versus the power to buy dominance over the people.
Obama has said “We are the change we have been waiting for.” Unfortunately all too many Americans don’t seem to grasp that “we” part. They remind me all too often of the scene from Life of Brian where Brian is standing in front of the crowd telling them, “You can think for yourselves!” and they all roar back, “WE CAN THINK FOR OURSELVES!”
I agree with this thread, and have said before that Obama’s just one guy. He will be a very powerful guy and can set the agenda, but the real work happens in Congress where the work gets done, which is why we have to adopt the strategy of “more and better Democrats” in Congress, at least until a better alternative reaches critical mass.
“we have to adopt the strategy of “more and better Democrats” in Congress“
Isn’t that what you all said in 2006? And look at all the good it did you! So, you think more totally useless Democrats will be better? I hope so, but I doubt it.
As a matter of fact, yes, that is what I said in 2006. I’m still waiting for those better Democrats to be elected, actually. I’m not sure how much hope I’m willing to hold out for the crop that’s coming out in 2008, but if we were to get on the stick and elect those better Democrats in 2010, we might be going somewhere. And now is the obvious time to start.
And you may have missed the part where I said “until a better alternative reaches critical mass.” Unfortunately all the current alternatives are completely unpalatable for one reason or another.
The only way the other alternatives are ever going to reach critical mass is if people stop voting for any Democrat just because he is not a Republican and start voting outside the box.
sig line offers another perspective on the third party option:
50 states, 210 media market, 435 Congressional Districts, 3080 counties, 192,480 precincts
The only way, in my opinion, any third party will ever get off the ground in this country is by starting in those 192,480 precincts, running successful candidates at the lower levels, and building a critical mass from the bottom up. And by “lower levels” I mean exactly that. School boards, city and county councils, and state legislatures.
I think it’d be great to see three or four parties in Congress, having to work together and actually negotiate to get legislation passed. But until lower-level candidates that the public is familiar with and like (and who can get funded for elections — another stumbling block toward any sort of third party) start coming up through the ranks, I don’t see it happening.
Yes, and I’ve been hearing that pretty much my entire life. “If enough people would ____________________ you’d have critical mass.” You can fill in the blank any number of ways. Speak Esperanto. Eat vegetarian. Vote for something besides Demopublicans.
Unfortunately people aren’t going to vote for third-party candidates, even when they know those candidates exist, unless those candidates have a realistic chance of winning, and no third party candidate is going to have a realistic chance of winning until they can break through that third-party barrier and get people to vote for them. Chicken, egg, chicken, egg. Catch-22.
It could someday happen. In fact I’d like to think it will happen eventally. But I don’t have the time to wait. My family’s health history is such that I could live another 30 years, or my ticker could stop and I could drop over dead on my keyboard right now. I have no way of knowing how long I’ve got, so I need to put my energy into a realistic effort to try to change the system from within — by supporting Democratic candidates whose priorities align with mine. This technique has the advantage that it’s been done successfully at least once before, so I know it’s possible.
Your mileage may vary, as always.
This is just amazingly irresponsible and wrong:
Do you have any facts you’d like to throw in with this casual defamation? I do. To wit:
Biden is one of the poorest people in the Senate. If he is corrupt, he sucks at it. The truth is, he is a decent public servant who has not spent his Senate years taking honoraria and getting rich. His book, Promises to Keep, describes how he made a promise in his first campaign that has haunted his financial life, but that he kept anyway. Look it up.
Offensive weaponry? Try up-armored vehicles for soldiers, which he fought to make the Pentagon buy, over the objections of Donald Rumsfeld who thought that soldiers were more expendable than Humvees. And with the way veterans’ benefits have been denied, Rumsfeld was probably right in his budgetary analysis. Biden has fought for soldiers, and for benefits for veterans, and thanks to him there are a lot of soldiers who didn’t come home in a box.
If you want more than a respite of four to eight years, if you want to make permanent change to the system we must change the system of election financing. Obama has been spectacularly successful at appealing directly to the voters, expanding the number of donors and decreasing the size of the average donation. That provides an opportunity. Two things need to happen next.
First: Obama and team need to generalize that internet based system sufficiently that it becomes an adequate basis of campaign finance for House and Senate Democrats for 2010.
Second: Obama and the Democrats need to pass campaign reform that provides primary and general federal election support for candidates who can show support in the range of a few percent from general revenues at a level of about $2 per voter. That will be enough to see that candidates are competitive and can get their messages out without becoming political prostitutes, as they must today.
As it is, reform of anything that touches financial interests can be political suicide. Politicians hate this systm. Ask Fritz Hollings or read his new book. Letting the self interested wealthy finance our political campaigns is the worst “bargain” we have ever made. The self dealing they get in return costs the public far, far more than the cost of financing the elections. Worse, if we cannot reform this system it will cost us our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The final step will be overturning the noxious Supreme Court doctrine that equates money with free political speech. That will require more time, either to replace existing Supreme Court judges, to enact a constitutional amendment, or both. That is why diluting the system as Obama has done and as I propose via public funding are essential preliminary steps.
As citizens, we have allowed this to happen. We must change this system. Most of our current legislators would probably like to change this system. Hollings, in his last campaign, had to raise $30,000/week and could not afford to visit his home state very often, as there was not enough money there for a Democrat. Without campaign reform, any change will be limited and temporary.
We should not talk about what “powers that be” will allow or not allow. We have allowed ourselves to become the instruments of our own oppression. It is up to us to change that. Concern about this situation extends far beyond the Democratic Party. We must rally it and use it to save our children’s and our grandchildren’s future.
Bringing radical change to the financing of elections is key to political and economic change. In Europe, many countries have set up very strict rules: in Belgium, France and Poland financing of political parties and candidates by legal entities like corporations and associations is prohibited, while it is strictly regulated in other countries. Moreover, in most countries, to avoid financial competition, campaign expenses are limited to a certain amount calculated based on the number of voters involved.
For more information, see Council of Europe’s Financing political parties and election campaigns guidelines
I do not advocate pressing this issue in the MSM until the last month or weeks of the campaign and only when victory has become more certain. Even a reprieve of the descent into the abyss is better than a McCain victory. But without campaign reform it will be very difficult to make any progress on health care, on reform of financial regulations and on establishing robust initiatives on renewable energy infrastructure.