It's MBNA Joe, and I'm Underwhelmed

Posted by Richard Blair, The All Spin Zone at 12:30 PM on August 24, 2008.

Joe Biden has been selected as Barack Obama’s running mate. Please excuse me if my enthusiasm level for the presidential race has dropped a notch further than it already was. While Obama has moved toward the political center in the past few months, MBNA Joe was already there long ago on most issues.

I’m not quite sure what to say, other than I’m underwhelmed.

Joe Biden (D-MBNA) was always Barack Obama’s “safe choice” for the Democratic Party VP nomination, and if nothing else, Obama had to select a running mate who was:

• A fairly reliable establishment Dem
• A Caucasian American
• A Penile American

Let’s take a read-back to the other day, when Obama described some of the criteria regarding his VP choice:

Obama said he wanted somebody who is “prepared to be president” and who will be “a partner with me in strengthening this economy for the middle class and working families.”

He said he was looking for not just a partner but a sparring partner. “I want somebody who’s independent, somebody who can push against my preconceived notions and challenge me so we have got a robust debate in the White House.”

And now, let’s quickly take Obama’s criteria apart, attribute by attribute, with respect to Joe Biden:

- Prepared to be president:

Joe Biden’s been around in politics for a long time. Basically, he’s a career politician from a small state in the Philadelphia media market. There’s no question that he cuts a fairly strong presence in one-on-one interviews, both in print and on the tube (Biden seems to thrive on the Sunday talkies). Having run for the office twice, he’s certainly developed the presence to be president. And, I guess to the legacy media, Biden also brings a certain illusion of gravitas to the ticket.

- A partner in strengthening this economy for the middle class and working families:

In early 2005, when Biden signaled his intent to run for president during this election cycle, I opined:

There are times for politics and there are times for doing the right thing. If Biden and the other Vichy Dems could not make that distinction when it counted, then they don't deserve my support.

This is one of Biden’s attributes with which I’m having the most difficulty. In the Senate, he was a leader of the pro-MBNA Democratic Party contingent during the debate (and eventual passage) of the odious Indentured Servitude Act of 2005. In 2007, near the outset of the housing / mortgage / foreclosure crisis, I wrote:

In all of the hand wringing about the sub-prime mortgage market implosion negatively impacting financial markets in general (and homeowners tied to those mortgages, in particular) , not one pundit has mentioned the delayed impact of the bankruptcy bill.

My words still stand today; perhaps even more so than when I first wrote the above. The 2005 bankruptcy bill was the most blatantly anti-family, anti-working class piece of legislation that has been passed in the course of my lifetime. Yet a significant number of Democrats, led by Joe Biden, lined up behind the corporate interests and passed the bill when they had the opportunity to kill it in cloture.

The bottom line: I’m very uncomfortable that Obama feels Biden has any cred at all in strengthening the economy for working class proles such as myself.

- Somebody who’s independent, somebody who can push against my preconceived notions and challenge me so we have got a robust debate in the White House…

Joe Biden is a decent debater, articulate, and (when necessary) passionate. But I don’t know that any VP in history, other than perhaps Dick Cheney, pushed back terribly hard against the president they served. And it’s pretty clear that Biden, for all of his occasional pit bull sounding rhetoric against the Bush administration, isn’t a real boat-rocker, and knows the side on which his corporate bread is buttered.

The bottom line: Could Obama have picked a better candidate? Yes, but probably no one with the national profile of Joe Biden. The name recognition already exists, and over the years, Biden has successfully cast himself as one of the elder statesman of foreign affairs in the Democratic Party. And gawd knows that the U.S. of A. is going to need a lot of statesmanship on the global stage to repair the damage wrought by the Bush regime.

I’m very unsettled by Obama’s choice of a running mate, but then again, I’m not sure that any of the short listed, vetted, and publicly considered VP contenders would have actually moved me to feel any more enthusiastic about Obama or his chances in November. But that might just be me. Your personal mileage (and tolerance for past political sins) may vary.

Here’s a link to Joe Biden’s recent voting record in the Senate.

Sean Mullen, who has known Biden for a long time, has a different take.

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Richard Blair is the blogmaster of All Spin Zone.