BIDEN FOR VEEP?….Matt Yglesias runs down a few reasons why John McCain would be ill advised to choose Condi Rice as VP, and I find them all convincing. I’d add a few more too, if I thought anyone was interested. But the whole prospect seems vanishingly unlikely to me, so I won’t bother.
But what about this?
I have a similar reaction to Marc Ambinder’s suggestion of Joe Biden for Barack Obama. Biden’s a sometimes maddening figure, but he’s been impressive lately and there’s a lot to be said on his behalf. But putting someone who voted for the war, even someone who did so half-heartedly and after making a quasi-promising effort to restrain Bush, seems to muddy way too much of the argument Obama is making.
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.
Seen from that perspective, Biden looks like a decent choice to me. Not as good as Warren Buffett, maybe, but still pretty good.
