Biden pick calls into question Obama’s judgement

Jonah Goldberg points out how Joe Biden makes a hash of Obama’s message:

In his career-making speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, Obama ridiculed “the pundits” who “like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states; red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats.” But when it came time to act “presidential,” Obama passed on several short-list VP candidates from red states — the governors of Virginia, Kansas, and Iowa — in favor of the senator from deep-blue Delaware.

Over the last two years, Obama’s campaign has gone further, investing a great deal in this idea of Obama as a post-partisan candidate who transcends all of these silly categories. Quoting the candidate, the official Republicans for Obama Web site proclaims: “For the first time in a long time, we have the chance to build a new majority of not just Democrats, but Independents and Republicans who’ve lost faith in their Washington leaders but want to believe again — who desperately want something new.”

And to feed that bottomless yearning for the new, Obama picked a Democrat who was first elected to the U.S. Senate when Obama was 11 years old and Richard Nixon was still popular. When Biden — already a seasoned pol — first ran for president, Duran Duran was still thought of as the cutting edge of music. What happened? Was Robert Byrd too trendy?

And what about all that jibber-jabber about post-partisanship? When Obama, the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, according to the 2007 vote scoring done by National Journal, picks the third-most-liberal senator, does that count as reaching across the aisle?

Even more flummoxing is Biden’s actual record. Put aside the fact that Biden’s biggest backers are trial lawyers and credit-card company lobbyists (so much for attacking business-as-usual), and there’s the signature issue of Obama’s campaign: the Illinois senator’s superior judgment on the war in Iraq. In his months-long battle against Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama insisted that his early opposition to the war represented singular proof of his qualifications to be president. But Biden, with his “unparalleled foreign policy experience” in the words of an Obama senior advisor, supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the same grounds that Clinton did.

So Obama asks voters to value judgment over experience or expertise; but when Obama himself chose someone best qualified to be president in his stead — “above all, I searched for a leader who is ready to step in and be president” he proclaimed Saturday in Springfield, Ill. — he went the opposite way.

I think it is beginning to dawn on some people that Obama’s primary campaign was a giant con game designed to win the nomination nothing more.  Oh sure, he likes to use the rhetoric and symbolism to raise money and sound idealistic, but he has no plans to sacrifice winning for consistency or coherence.

If Obama really was a bold leader, something different, he would have had the courage to act differently; to take a risk.  The fact that he didn’t says a lot about him.