The Lofty Lantern

Chris Cilizza, a lead political reporter for the Washington Post, makes the case for Joe Biden today noting that the Delaware Senator is the “hottest” VP candidate for Obama. He’ll be writing tomorrow the case against him, but that’s no reason not to start now.

On the one hand, Biden seems like the perfect candidate; he’s chock full of experience, particularly on foreign policy, can speak well and clearly, and is never boring. Then there’s his being white Catholic man originally from Pennsylvania, exactly the demographic which Obama will badly need in this campaign.

And if he could be that, then he would be a viable candidate for Obama. His only problem is his inability to shut up. Chuck Todd, probably the best political analyst in the business, noted favorably Biden’s staying out of the news for the past two weeks as evidence that maybe he has grown. Except Biden’s problem isn’t staying out of the news - it’s getting into it in the way that he wants.

From his disastrous questioning of Samuel Alito at his confirmation hearing, where when he was supposed to be attacking the conservative judge, he managed to find a way to insult Princeton University, to the start of his 2008 campaign when he somehow offended a truly impressive range of people with his characterization of Obama as “clean,” to his comment about the ethnicity of many 7/11 owners in Delaware, Biden doesn’t seem able to say twenty sentences in a row without saying 3 stupid things. This doesn’t preclude the fact that he may say 12 smart things too, but in this political climate, nobody will care about the smart things nearly as much as the stupid ones. The idiotic comments are especially damaging considering he would be expected to provide solidity and gravitas to the Obama campaign. If Barack Obama doesn’t look like some people’s perception of a President, then Joe Biden wearing a Princeton cap to his second round of questioning Alito in an effort to mitigate any concerns that some might have that he insulted the school - well, that doesn’t look like anybody’s perception of a President.

Obama’s problem isn’t intelligence or lack of ideas. (Disturbingly,) he needs somebody who looks and seems and feels like a potential President to everybody in the country. He needs somebody who feels solid and surefooted, often, but not always, the result of experience. He can’t choose somebody simply because they have a long resume.

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The Republican Governor of South Carolina was considered a serious candidate to be John McCain’s Vice President until he went on television. Now, everybody, from the uninformed to the leading expert on South Carolinian politics, Lee Bandy, says he won’t be it.

What happened?

A reporter asked Sanford on television, what were the differences on economic policies between McCain and Bush, and Sanford blanked. He said he couldn’t come up with one, for maybe a minute until he finally did.

There have certainly been better television appearances, especially considering McCain would like nothing more than to distinguish himself from Bush, particularly on economic policies, particularly at this moment. But is this really a fatal mistake? Joe Biden, who is now imagined by some to be a legitimate Vice Presidential candidate, described Obama as “clean,” in one of the odder scandals of this cycle. John McCain has been trying to undo the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact by readhering the Czech Republic to Slovakia. Hillary Clinton had her confusing answer on licenses for illegal immigrants.Nobody has declared the end to any of these people’s careers.

If George Allen taught us in 2006 with the macaca incident that Youtube can kill, it is now becoming apparent that with the amount of video cameras on every (national) candidate, there will be such videos on everybody. We’ve jumped the fence and are in the land of overkill. (This will, incidentally, become more, rather than less true, as noted by former Ramaz grad Jacob Savage and some other person.)

The point being that if such videos don’t exist on the other “viable” Vice Presidential candidates, that is simply a matter of time. (I already miss Dan Quayle) And what damage exactly would this video do? Is McCain really afraid Obama is going to spend his warchest on a 60 second ad to attack his Vice Presidential candidate? If Sanford does get chosen (which wasn’t and remains not particularly likely), all this will become is a youtube video seen by the partisans for the respective campaigns. It might make the news, briefly. It’ll become quickly just another of the whole mess of negative news cycles that this campaign seems doomed to become.

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