Obama Picks Biden:
It's official. Being from Delaware myself, I think that's pretty cool; I've liked Senator Biden ever since he spoke to my 7th grade class during our class trip to Washington. How the nomination will play outside the First State is another matter, though.
As Delaware goes, so goes the ... Nope.
Hell, DuPont doesn't even make ammo any more.
At least JFK had the sense to pick a VP from a big state.
It's so storybook, man!
does anyone not within the obama campaign think this was a wise choice?
About the only person better for the Republicans would have been Bill Ayers. Maybe he can still be secretary of education.
But not nearly as interesting as watching Republicans support a guy they accused n 2000 of fathering a bastard child, having a drug addict for a wife, and being a homosexual and a mentally unstable traitor.
"I think John McCain would be a great candidate for vice president."
Nice catch, but there's another way to look at that. Biden's prior statement gives him a nice platform to talk about how much McCain has changed recently (pandering to the right, negative campaigning etc). 'Today's McCain is a shadow of the man I once knew…'
Good point. But there's been lots of very entertaining GOP name-calling against McCain (e.g., "liar") much more recently than that. Some details here.
My state was a slave state?
And thus he will carry South Carolina.
Obama would have been better off with Edwards - Elizabeth, not John or Chet.
I, too, am always surprised by what a sucker I am for politicians I see in person, even though I know they're politicians mostly because they're good at suckering me. :)
I see this as an opportunity for McCain. Whether or not he takes it is another matter. I AM however even more firmly in the "whoever first puts a non-Senator on their ticket deserves to win" camp. Good grief.
At least Biden came clean and released records, which is more than BHO is willing to do.
I also remember seeing a video of Biden telling a questioner that he graduated in the upper half of his law school class. Now that's unlikely to be a mistake as virtually everyone knows his standing in law school. Although I have to say, over all, he seems like a decent guy. Perhaps he's simply inept, and I guess that's ok because a VP has little to do.
But Sen. Biden, wasn't he the guy who got shock treatments or hair transplants or both?
Certainly not to McCain.
Image polishers, unite!
Doesn't seem to help the ticket. Hillary would have been better if you don't mind wearing kevlar all the time.
Biden is going to torture McCain so frequently and so thoroughly that McCain's staff will probably give up on that memo-meme they keep repeating about him once bing a POW, trying to ward off any and all tiny criticisms, and simply dress him up in a POW outfit.
Palin Palin Palin Palin Palin
The Democrats are basically reduced to sputtering, "Well primary opponents always say mean things: look at what George H.W. Bush said about Ronald Reagain" but even so, I found the ad mildly amusing.
I actually have a substantive question for anyone who knows anything about Delaware law, though. Joe Biden's Senate seat is up this year. He was cruising toward re-election. Will he have to drop his Senate re-election bid in order to run for Vice President?
(1) "Wah, Biden was for the war" - so were most people. Obama is trying to get those people's votes.
(2) "Dems sputter b/c Biden praised McCain in 2004" - JBG demolished that above; read the thread.
(3) "Dumb Biden splitting up Iraq" - several pundits were kicking that idea around, Biden didn't invent it. Were it not for Turkey freaking out &the Shiites getting all the oil, that would have its merits.
(4) "Who's Biden to split up a country?" Dude, look up the history of Iraq &see where it came from in the first place. Hint: the answer includes "splitting," "up," "a," and "country."
Did you miss 8th grade due to the length of the speech?
Obama: One house, one spouse.
I was aware of the Texas law. I had forgotten about Connecticut. I know that my state has a law that a candidate can run for exactly one office--and that includes the Presidency and Vice Presidency. This, of course, contrasts with New Jersey, where a politician can actually hold more than one office at a time.
I am curious because IF Biden is required to abandon his re-election bid then I can see a movement by the Republicans to take it by dumping their current candidate and substituting Congressman Mike Castle (a former Governor).
If Biden is allowed to run for both, then the open gubernatorial race will be critical, since the new Governor will appoint Biden's successor.
That does say something important: it says that Obama definitely does not plan to govern from the center, at least domestically. It also says that Obama is leaving the center open for McCain to grab. Biden is definitely not a pick designed to appeal to independents or disaffected Republicans. The question is whether McCain is smart enough to go for it, or whether he is too intimidated by the Rick Warrens and Rush Limbaughs of the world to take a step to the left and lock this thing up.
McCain's not a moderate, and the GOP detests moderates.
No, I didn't forget to add something that makes absolutely no sense, even as a snark. Keep trying?
Ditto.
Thanks for the info. I wasn't sure.
But not as much nonsense as you claiming on the other thread that you prefer your presidents to have military experience. Were you making that point in 2004 when Kerry was running against Bush?
Maybe McCain will pick Romney, and then we can have fun watching the video where Romney says McCain is "dishonest."
============
jg:
McCain just said he thinks life begins at conception, so he seems to be stepping the other way. Maybe he doesn't care that he has now invited lots of questions about all sorts of things like stem cells, IUDs and IVF.
Biden in particular does not hide his disdain, which is a rather serious flaw in any candidate for elective office.
So what we have now is Obama's running mate reinforcing and further dramatizing Obama's biggest weakness.
I doubt it will take the GOP long to figure this one out and exploit it.
Your lack of self-awareness makes me giggle with delight!
That's called "character." Your HE-RO Odumbo would have folded like a card table in about three milliseconds... make that three microseconds... IF he had even stepped up and served his country. Which he didn't. Odumbo took the gravy train, and let other Americans fight for our country -- while sucking up to his pals and disparaging our country.
But Odumbo sure did parlay that Affirmative Action, didn't he? [Go ahead, answer that question. I want to get that particular conversation going again.]
Oh, spare me the POW line. Now McSame's just like Guiliani."A noun, a verb and POW."
How much character does it take to be able to go to the Naval Academy simply because you daddy and granddaddy went there?
How much character does it take to finish fourth from the bottom of your class?
How much character does it take to leave your first wife* for a trust fund babe?
*http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1024927/
The-wife-John-McCain-callously-left-behind.html
Being a POW 40 odd years ago is about all he's running on.
Which part is "false?" Are you denying that someone spread this smear about McCain, or are you just claiming you think the smearer was someone other than Rove? McCain himself wrote this (Worth the Fighting For, p. 385):
According to McCain, someone spread that story. What's your theory about who it was? Vince Foster?
No. The Clintons had already killed him.
DUH!
What news coverage usually does is pretty much what you do -- mention a couple of negative attacks from the Bush campaign that actually have been corroborated, and then add in a string of others that haven't been and gloss over the fact that the latter haven't. There were 'push polls' confirmed to have been arranged by the Bush campaign that tried to link McCain to the Keating scandal. None about black babies.Where does McCain say that someone spread that story? That quote you cite doesn't say anything about "that story." He speaks in generalities about "all kinds of wild rumors." The closest one is "having sired children with prostitutes," which isn't the same thing.
Of the smears that were made, we know a Bob Jones professor named Richard Hand was responsible for some of them, including the illegitimate children one that McCain alludes to. (But Hand never said a black child.) Hand, needless to say, is a different person than Karl Rove.
McCain had plenty of enemies (and Bush had plenty of supporters). The notion that Karl Rove was responsible for everything bad that was said about one of Bush's opponents is crazy talk.
You're essentially claiming that McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis is someone who is inclined to make a big deal over nothing. You quoted him, but you didn't give us the link. If you had, it would be easier for readers to see that he said this:
So while he had to admit he didn't know "how many calls were made," he's claiming that enough calls were made for the smear to be effective. And he claims that this is the reason McCain lost. If, as you claim, all that's really behind this are "a couple of isolated anecdotes," then McCain's campaign manager is quite a crybaby. Then again, it's possible that he's not, and he simply knows more about the facts than you do.
By this time, Rove already had a long track record of dirty campaigning. Which is why Bush's daddy fired him in 1992, "after he [Rove] planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak." When a serial arsonist is found standing near the scene of yet another blaze, it's not "crazy talk" to state the obvious.
(*) And there should have been, if Rove was involved, if there was actually such a push polling campaign, because campaigns have to reveal their expenditures. That's how people knew about the Keating-related calls.
Actually, no, it isn't. Nice try, but he was fired for allegedly leaking insider details about the Bush campaign, not for "dirty campaigning."Sorry, but you don't get to rely on "the obvious," not with your incessant demands for "proof" of the obvious. And no, it's certainly not "obvious" that Rove is responsible for every fire in an entire state just because he smokes cigarettes.
Particularly not when there are thousands of other "arsonists" in the country. Plenty of people disliked McCain.
You're sticking with the implausible claim that Rick Davis couldn't possibly have any information beyond the information that's available to you and me. And if the only information available to him is "a couple of isolated anecdotes," then he's quite an exaggerator and crybaby, since he claims the existence of "a smear campaign." If someone claims the existence of "a smear campaign," when the only information they have is "a couple of isolated anecdotes," then that person is obviously a whiner and a crybaby. This tells us something about McCain's ability to judge character, since McCain and Davis have been close for a long time.
Then you're accusing Davis of being someone who claims to know things that "he can't possibly know." Because he didn't say that McCain lost because of attacks that were "open and overt." Davis refers to the existence of a specific, covert smear campaign, involving a specific allegation "that McCain's Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child." He then says "these smears … worked: We lost South Carolina by a wide margin."
In other words, the claim you're making is that McCain lost because of "negative attacks on McCain -- the vast majority of which were open and overt." Obviously you're free to make that claim, but Davis is making a different claim. He claims "we lost South Carolina" because of "a smear campaign … that McCain's Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child."
According to you, that smear campaign was just "a couple of isolated anecdotes." If so, then Davis is an exaggerator, a whiner and a crybaby, and McCain is a poor judge of character.
Rove was fired for both. His purpose in "leaking insider details about the Bush campaign" was to discredit his own political enemy, Mosbacher. In this case, the intended beneficiary of Rove's dirty campaigning was Rove.
The number of people who won that campaign against McCain is exactly one, and his name is Bush. And Rove has been one of Bush's closest advisors for many years. And Rove has a long track record of dirty campaigning. If you can't connect the dots, that's your problem.
You objected here. So what's your objection? According to Davis, someone did indeed accuse McCain of "fathering a bastard child." And it's not just Davis who believes that. McCain believes it, too. He wrote this:
(Emphasis added.) So either Davis and McCain are both liars, and made that up, or someone did indeed accuse McCain "of fathering a bastard child." So even if you claim it wasn't Rove, are you really claiming it wasn't "Republicans?" Because that's all the original commenter claimed, and that's the claim to which you objected. That's why I asked you if you thought Vince Foster did it.
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