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 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 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.