though i'm going to be out of town during the convention -- and, indeed, will be going in quite the opposite direction from denver -- i'm probably more likely to watch parts of it, since i will be in a hotel room which will probably have a TV. i wouldn't have watched otherwise. i have a feeling i'll try to avoid watching, if i can.
but seriously, though. biden? BIDEN? mr joe my-life's-work-fucked-up-the-lending-sector-and-the-US-economy-just-for-some-constituents biden?
i've refrained from talking much on my blog at all, and i've tried to refrain from talking politics. i know most everyone who reads this is at least sorta-kinda pro-obama. i'm wondering, though, if people are still so into him. you don't have to respond, of course. but i'd be curious, either way.
posted by anne @ 11:54 AM
10 Comments:
If he actually goes with Biden, I will be disappointed. Mainly, becuase I want to see the VP as someone who can and will take over as a party leader someday, and frankly, I can't see Biden as president, not ever.
I was never so into him, but I was pretty resigned to him and willing to see the good things that others saw. But the names being talked around for VP suggest that his campaign has no idea at all why people have misgivings:
He doesn't seem liberal enough and he's not great on feminism? How about a moderate conservative who has said extremely negative things about women in the military!
Some people don't find him that exciting? Well, next to Joe Biden everybody looks exciting!
I remain sorta-kinda pro-Obama, in addition to being realla-totalla anti-McCain. I see Obama as a better than average politician who's making people care who might not have done so otherwise, and I'm happy about that. I see him as being roughly in the same place on the political spectrum as both of the Clintons, if not slightly to their left, and I can deal with that. I see him as someone willing to compromise more than I'd like him to, but at least he admits it. And I recognize that even with that willingness to compromise he probably won't be able to do much in this political climate, but that'd be true of anyone in his position.
On the whole, I would say that I do actually plan to vote for Obama rather than simply against McCain, which is something of a novel sensation for me.
(I don't know anything about the names being thrown around for VPs, but Biden would be a annoying choice, yeah.)
My take on Obama remains more or less what it has been for a while: like every Democratic presidential candidate in my adult life, he's much more conservative than me; unlike the others, I think he frames the political debate in ways that are good for the left; he's the closest thing we've got to an anti-war candidate; and he has demonstrated competence and an interest in getting subtle details of policy right, which is desperately needed in the White House right now almost regardless of politics.
Joe Biden is a fairly repellent human being, and I'll be sad inside if he becomes vice president. Is he seriously under consideration?
martin: each of the current candidates for VP has, uh, some baggage. i could lay it out if you're interested, but they're all flawed. any choice would have drawbacks, of course, but almost everyone under serious consideration kind of sucks.
it's interesting that obama seems left of clinton to you. why is that? (and please, they're not a unit; the politics of bill are not necessarily the politics of hillary.)
moss: biden's got the best odds at the moment, with bayh running second and richardson a very distant third. bayh is so hated by the netroots/blogosphere that there's a facebook group opposing his nomination, but that's unlikely to influence much; they're right, though, in that he's too hawkish to appeal much to those who chose obama because of his original stance on iraq. richardson probably doesn't bring enough to the ticket to be considered seriously. sebelius is unlikely, and i would guess kaine is even more unlikely. clinton's a long shot, too.
clark appears to be out of the running, unless the campaign has an extraordinarily tricksy convention surprise in store, and i'm not sure why they'd exert that sort of effort -- it's already been announced that he won't be attending the convention on that night, and indeed will be out of the country. he was apparently informed by the obama staff that his presence was unnecessary.
so, yeah. The Senator From Visa and Mastercard is not only under serious consideration, but the top pick, at the moment, as far as anyone can tell.
biden's a seriously weird pick, particularly considering some of his odd statements during the primary: 'clean and articulate' was his gaffe, after all.
Are Hillary's politics significantly different from Bill's? I mean this as a serious question: I don't see it, but I'm also habitually blinded by people's associations with the Clinton administration, hence voting against Gore in 2000. I do get that she's a feminist, apparently legitimately so, which is pretty big in itself. But are there other differences?
I meant in no way to consider the Clintons as a unit, merely to indicate that they're both, like Obama, slightly-leftish politicians. (I would put Hillary left of Bill, but maybe that's partially because of the difference between what gets promised on the campaign trail and what happens over the course of eight years in office.) I deliberately fudged my comment about "being roughly in the same place on the political spectrum... if not slightly to their left" for a variety of reasons, ranging from the very good one that "left-right" is a vast oversimplification to the less good one that I didn't really want to get bogged down in the details of a comparison between the three. So you called my bluff, basically.
Biden goes in the category of Kerry and Edwards of politicians I find viscerally and superficially repugnant. I mean, good lord, the teeth. He's the living image of Soapy Molloy. However, I believe my mother likes him. I also find the vice presidency deeply pointless, so have been trying not to pay any attention.
Obama is like the Potter books. After I've been away for a while, I sort of default to a sort of reflexive cynicism about them, but then when I go back and listen/read, I remember that they're really bloody good.
Okay, it is totally kind of weird that I just now came to my computer from rereading Deathly Hallows for no apparent reason.
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