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Gerard Baker says “Yes we can” might not be magic anymore, and Barack might lose.
… How can it be, you ask? Didn’t we see him just last month speaking to 200,000 adoring Germans in Berlin? Didn’t he get the red carpet treatment in France – France of all places? Doesn’t every British politician want to be seen clutching the hem of his garment?
All true. But as cruel geography and the selfish designs of the American Founding Fathers would have it, Europeans don’t get to choose the US president. Somewhere along the way to the Obama presidency, somebody forgot to ask the American people.
And wouldn’t you know it, they insist on looking this gift thoroughbred in the mouth. Who’d have thought it? You present them with the man who deigns to deliver them from their plight and they want to sit around and ask hard questions about who he is and what he believes and where he might actually take the country. The ingrates! …
Many of our favorites have Biden opinions. Ed Morrissey is first.
… It’s an admission that Obama’s inexperience has finally begun worrying voters, and not just Democratic power brokers. There really is no other way to see an addition of Biden to the ticket. Obama can’t be worried about carrying Delaware, after all; it’s as safe a state that Democrats have. Nor does Biden have a natural national constituency, as his own flop of a presidential campaign proved this cycle.
The Biden choice is an act of desperation borne of a summer-long catastrophe. There isn’t any other reason for Obama to choose a 35-year veteran of the Senate with as long a history of gaffes and flat-out dishonesty as his second on the campaign for Hope and Change. In fact, I can’t wait for writers to twist themselves into knots to avoid the cardinal sin of writing, plagiarism, which Biden committed more than once, as Jim Geraghty recounted in 2003: …
Power Line follows.
Few would argue that Joe Biden is among our brightest Senators, but that hasn’t prevented him from obtaining a prominent role on two of the most high-profile Senate Committees – the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. Now that the front-runner in the presidential campaign has tapped Biden to be his running mate, it’s worth taking a few moments to reflect on Biden’s performance on these two committees. We’ll start with the Judiciary Committee.
Biden’s performance there has been disgraceful. He was part of the mob that, during the Bork confirmation process, defeated a highly qualified nominee on no other grounds than disagreement with his views. This step, unprecedented as it was, transformed the rules for judicial confirmation. And it transformed them for the worse, since the long-term effect of the new approach, once the Republicans fully embrace it as they must, will be to create a bias in favor of moderate non-entities, thereby quite possibly depriving the Court of some of its best potential Justices.
Reasonable people can disagree with this assessment, but a reasonable person would be hard-pressed to defend what the Judiciary Committee, under Biden’s leadership, did to Clarence Thomas. Well past the eleventh hour, with Thomas about to sail through to confirmation, Biden decided to hold a “trial” to determine whether, almost a decade earlier, Thomas had committed such outrages as remarking to Anita Hill that dirt on a can of soda looked like pubic hair. Suddenly, it became acceptable to vote against confirming a Supreme Court Justice not just because one disagreed with his views, but also because (according to one witness who had not come forward for years) he had a “potty mouth.”
Over the next dozen or so years, Biden helped extend this new regime to nominees for the U.S. Court of Appeals. Biden’s legacy, then, is a fully politicized system of confirming federal judges – one that will continue to produce ugly spectacles like the Bork and Thomas hearings, undermine respect for the judiciary (a mixed consequence, in my view), and promote mediocrity on the bench. …
Corner Post from Peter Wehner.
I have now watched and read Senator Biden’s speech in Springfield earlier today. From the perspective of the craft of speechwriting, it was quite a thing to behold.
In a speech of just over 16 minutes, Biden used, by my count, the phrase “ladies and gentlemen” 18 times. (Apparently “ladies and gentlemen” is to Biden what “my friends” is to Senator McCain). Biden’s speech was filled with the predictable hackneyed phrases. We were told the American Dream is both “slipping away” and dropping off a cliff. And “the future keeps receding further and further and further away as your reach for your dreams.” Biden feels things with “ever fiber of my being.” Barack Obama possesses “steel in his spine.” And so forth. Biden also made silly claims, such as this being the “last chance to reclaim the America we love, to restore America’s soul.” …
John Podhoretz in Contentions.
… I think the nation should offer profound thanks to Barack Obama for the Biden choice because of the real possibility that there will be unexpected moments of comedy between now and Election Day. For the thing is that Biden doesn’t just have a big mouth. He actually has an identifiable problem. It’s called logorrhea. When he starts speaking, it is nearly impossible for him to figure out how to stop. Almost every blunder he has made in the past decade is due to the free associating that is the ancillary effect of his prolixity.
Surely he has guaranteed the Obama camp that he can keep himself in control. But he’s a man nearing 70, and men nearing 70 do not change. Honestly, this could be fun.
…
… Chris Matthews, on MSNBC, sets the tone for the coming five days: “This looks like the best possible choice.” The Biden choice is the opening of a mainstream-media return to uncritical Obama coverage. …
And Jennifer Rubin.
… John is right that the media is already in overdrive on the Biden-gushing. But does it matter? What we know is that mainstream media fawning has no correlation with real voters’ reactions. They kvelled over the Berlin speech, marveled at the ease with which Barack Obama followed his scripted interludes with heads of state and gasped in reverence at his nuanced answers to Rick Warren. But the public had a different reaction. None of these episodes helped and many, or all, arguably hurt Obama. By now we should know that there are no less reliable predictors of voter reaction than the mainstream pundit class.
Why? Aside from being hopelessly infatuated with The One, they do not represent the views, values or demographic attributes of voters actually in play. MSM pundits are generally liberal, urban, highly educated, nonreligious, obsessed with rhetoric, and lacking real world experience outside politics/media. In other words, pretty much like Obama. They show no inclination to explore any topic — the Mayor Daley machine, the Bill Ayers connection, Obama’s state senate record — that might throw the Obama narrative off balance. …
Debra Saunders writes on attack dogs, GOP and Dem.
In politics, everyone wants to be seen as a mudslinging virgin – who, like King Lear, is “more sinned against than sinning.” Toward that end, Democrats have crafted the conceit that Republicans are attack dogs, while Democratic candidates are not sufficiently ruthless. After years of calling President Bush every name in the book, the left nonetheless manages to see itself as the victim in the smear game.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama knows how to play to that conceit. In a speech before a Veterans of Foreign Wars gathering in Florida on Tuesday, Obama went into woe-is-me mode as he responded to Republican candidate John McCain’s criticism of Obama’s opposition to the successful U.S. troop surge in Iraq.
“One of the things that we have to change in this country is the idea that people can’t disagree without challenging each other’s character and patriotism,” said Obama. “I have never suggested that Sen. McCain picks his positions on national security based on politics or personal ambition. I have not suggested it, because I believe that he genuinely wants to serve America’s national interest. Now, it’s time for him to acknowledge that I want to do the same.”
Poor baby. To hear his lament, you’d never guess that Obama repeatedly has argued that McCain picks his positions out of ambition. Obama recently told a group, “The price (McCain) paid for his party’s nomination has been to reverse himself on position after position.” …
The Economist continues on bellwether states. This week it’s Nevada and New Mexico.
… In both states Mr McCain has a powerful weapon that he has mysteriously failed to deploy so far. He is a local man whose home state touches both New Mexico and Nevada. As a result, he can talk confidently about pressing regional issues like water, grazing on federal lands and the travails of American Indians—none of which will be familiar to someone who cut his political teeth in Chicago. Ronald Reagan did this, and ruled the West. Mr McCain needs to start doing the same