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August 19, 2009
E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
And The Winner Is...The GOP!
Is it just me or was anybody else rooting for Mike Gravel? Even if you weren't (Really? Anybody?), you can be forgiven for being surprised at the Obama campaign's choice of Joe Biden to run for vice president alongside the Illinois senator.
So the papers say, Biden is a consummate Washington insider, an "attack dog" with decades of experience and oodles of foreign policy connections. He was just in Georgia, you know, for a sit-down with the embattled nation's leader. He supports the war, but not the president; is a Roman Catholic, but favors abortion rights. Biden also has a good backstory, full of tribulations and struggle and working class roots. Biden brings with him the experience and foreign policy clout that Obama ostensibly lacks, while providing strength among the working class in the Midwest. It all looks great, except for the fact that the man sticks his foot in his mouth more often than your average housecat.
Couldn't the Obama team have found someone less likely to derail the whole campaign by saying something embarrassing? Now that I think of it, maybe Mike Gravel wouldn't have been such a good choice after all.
Accompanying every story of Biden's appointment is his fast-growing "Greatest Hits" of offensive faux-pas. Like the one about Indian-Americans in Delaware working at 7-11s, or the one about Obama being "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." I'm sure he meant no offense to Kanye West when he said this, but still, you've got to wonder what exactly he was doing on that day of public speaking training when they tell you that racism doesn't go over so well with people these days. Yeesh.
Not to second-guess the dozens of lawyers who pored over Biden's financial, medical and political records in the vetting process, but this has disaster written all over it. All it takes these days is a simple slip of the tongue on a rainy campaign stop in Omaha, multiplied by a few million over YouTube, to completely ruin a campaign. And if Biden couldn't even make it to the primaries without making not one but several potentially calamitous gaffes, what hope is there for him in the coming election?
If Obama's as bright as Biden says he is, he'll do the talking from here on in.