Job-Swapping and Populism: perhaps the wrong guy is president

The idiotic Sally Quinn, unable to relinquish her role as Washington powerbroker now that she no longer has a regular column in the Washington Post, opined yesterday that perhaps Hillary Clinton should be Vice President and Joe Biden should be Secretary of State. It's amusing to remember that the same woman who is now saying this:

Clinton has done an incredible job as secretary of state. First of all, she has worked harder than anyone should ever be expected to. She has managed to do the impossible: She is the ambassador of the United States to the world, maintaining her credibility while playing the bad guy to President Obama's good guy, such as with North Korea, Iran and Israel, and still looking good. She has been a true team player. If Clinton is dissatisfied with her role, you would never know it. She has been loyal and supportive to the president and has maintained a good relationship with him and with others in the White House. If she is being left out of the policymaking, or being sent on trips to keep her out of town, she has not shown it. She is cheerful, thoughtful, serious and diligent. There are no horror stories about her coming out of the State Department. Most notable, though, is that Bill Clinton has not been the problem that so many anticipated. He has been supportive of her and of Obama, and he has stayed out of the limelight and been discreet about his own life.

...was singing a different tune during the Clinton years, as she recited a litany of Washington society clutching its pearls about Bill Clinton.. And as recently as 2007, Quinn was all up in arms because Hillary Clinton refused to kiss her ring:

Sally Quinn: In terms of entertaining being partisan, it started with Clinton. The people who were seen as “hostesses” were people who had money or were raising money.… When the stuff about Clinton and women started appearing, in the second term, things shut down. Everybody wanted to go hide in a cave. For people willing to defend him, it became intolerable for them to go out.

In 2000, after being elected to the Senate, Hillary Clinton bought a fashionable house near the British and Italian Embassies. Before her run for the presidency, she added on to the house in order to have more space for entertaining.

Since Hillary has been here in the Senate for the last eight years, I think I’ve seen her twice. Otherwise, she is at fund-raisers. She entertains constantly, but it is all political. It is people who work for her or raise money for her.

Quinn is the perfect embodiment for everything that is wrong with the unholy marriage of petty government and an equally petty press. However, she may be onto something here, though not the job-swap she's thinking.

In retrospect, despite the fact that Joe Biden was known as "The Senator From MBNA", perhaps he was the best candidate all along. I always thought that Biden was a hack to end all hacks, but if what America wants now is passionate populism, Biden would be the guy. Watch him yesterday talk to the press about Rep. Joe Barton's groveling before BP head Tony Hayward:

Now, Biden's record of coddling the credit card industry gives lie as well to the idea of populism, of being for the political rhetorical image of the lunchpail guy, the guy who, well, takes the train every day to work and comes home tired (except where that guy on the train is a banker). But if the state of politics today is all about the image, the symbols -- Ronald Reagan in a cowboy hat automatically meaning he's a rugged individualist, George Bush in a flightsuit perceived as genuine toughness instead of drag, BP being shaken down by the black man in the White House, when why SHOULDN'T the former Senator from MBNA be the face of American populism, especially in the aftermath of Joe Barton's "Poor Pitiful BP" moment? He's a Washington guy, he was always a favorite on the Sunday gasbag shows -- perhaps HE should take the top spot for a while. If nothing else, he's shut up the cacophony of press bullshit long enough to be able to do his job.

Go, Joe, Go!

Joltin' Joe Biden isn't going to let David Gregory's inevitable fellation of Dick Cheney go unanswered:

UPDATE: If you needed any further proof that Dick Cheney is a sick, psychopathic, murderous motherfucker, you got it on "This Weak" (sic) today:

When asked by ABC’s Jonathan Karl whether the U.S. government should have had the option to use “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding with Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, former Vice President Dick Cheney said, “I think you ought to have all of those capabilities on the table.”

Too bad floating host Jonathan Karl didn't ask this evil man on what he bases this view, since Abdulmuttalab has been singing like a canary WITHOUT being waterboarded. I guess Cheney must need torture to feed the darkness in his soul.

Malia, Sasha.......and Joe

The Obama girls aren't the only kids who were promised a puppeh after the election.

It seems President-elect Barack Obama's children were not the only ones promised a dog after the presidential election. Biden's wife, Jill, made the same assurance to her husband if he and Obama, his running mate, won the election.

Jill Biden had taped pictures of different dogs on the back of the seat in front of Biden on his campaign plane to inspire the candidate as he crisscrossed the country in the final sprint to election day, according to published reports during the campaign.

Saturday, Biden selected a three-

month-old male German shepherd from one of Brown's litters, a puppy that will turn out to be a "big boy," Brown said with a chuckle.

"He is the nicest person on this earth," Brown said about her meeting with Biden, the Democratic senator from Delaware, now getting ready to take over the office of vice president.

A spokeswoman at Biden's transition press office said the office does not comment on Biden's personal matters but did confirm that Biden had two German shepherds in the past and likes the breed.

Joltin' Joe

Yes I Can Has Eight Years of This Plz?

The beginning is standard Biden boilerplate stump speech. But then he really gets going:

A lot of us are going to be disappointed with this message of "move on." But alas, I think Joe Biden may be right. The Bush Administration has so completely wrecked the country, and Senile and the Nitwit have so thoroughly whipped up the hate machine that is the Republican Party, pitting American against American over so-called "issues" that mean nothing, that if this country is to survive we are going to probably have to say, "I don't care who started it. I insist that it stop."

Yes, it means that a lot of very bad people, including George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are going to go free. Yes, it means we won't get to see them marched off to the Hague in order to stand trial for war crimes. But when millions of people are homeless after being foreclosed, and unemployment is up around 8-11%, as some are predicting will happen by next year, what's going to be more important? Fixing the mess or getting revenge?

As Dorothy Parker once said, living well is the best revenge. Let's go show these sniveling, frightened, greedy, venal, ugly, hateful, willfully ignorant mouth-frothers on the right just how civilization is done.

Your Sunday Cute Overload

Budding reporter Damon Weaver, a Florida fifth-grader:

Note how Joe Biden actually KNOWS what the Vice President does "ivry dee."

The moment when Joe Biden won the debate

Of course the wingnuts will say that Biden was exploiting his personal tragedy for personal gain, ignoring the way Sarah Palin plans to marry off her daughter to a certain wife-beater because the McCain camp thinks it'll get them votes. But this was a "Don't tell me I don't know what real Americans are going through" moment that blew anything Palin, who's lived a pretty charmed life, right out of the water.

The Candidate of Willful Ignorance

Has there ever been a candidate who revels in being a backwards, uninformed theocrat the way Sarah Palin does?

As John Cole so succinctly put it in advance of the debate, "As long as she does not murder a puppy then potty herself on stage, the pundits will proclaim it a win", anything more coherent than the Katie Couric debate would have been construed by some as a Palin victory. But I think that despite the fact that Palin lookalikes are in great demand for porn flicks, most of the punditocracy has awakened from its love affair with the hot hockey mom from Wasilla. I had expected the pundits to talk about the Comeback Kid last night, but Howard Fineman was on Hardball likening Palin to "a wolverine grabbing the leg of a passerby." I'm sure this remark will be met with cries of "sexism!" from the usual suspects on both the left AND the right, and I'm not sure I'd give Palin that much credit. But while she is very good at stringing talking points together, and condescending to the so-called "low information voter" with her Annie Oakley, "durn tootin'"-isms, much of the country has finally awakened to what eight years of Republican governance hath wrought, and I don't think the country is thinking with its collective dick enough to believe that the governor of a state with the population of Hackensack, NJ is qualified to be one melanoma recurrence, or stroke, away from the presidency. Because all the "betcha"s and "darn right"s and the other folksy (and increasingly nauseating) utterances out of Palin's mouth don't take away from the fact that without the talking points fed to her by the McCain camp, she really IS like the regular Joe -- the "low-information voter". But when you live in treacherous times the way do, "she can learn" and "surround herself with good people" just doesn't wash anymore, especially after eight years of George W. Bush.

From a New York Times editorial today:

...Ms. Palin never really got beyond her talking points in 90 minutes, mostly repeating clichés and tired attack lines and energetically refusing to answer far too many questions.

It's no wonder she thinks the worst thing Dick Cheney did was to shoot a friend in the face.

One can argue (and her supporters will) that Ms. Palin is a newcomer and can’t be expected to know all of the wonkish details, that what matters is the image she projects. Except, anyone who is running for vice president in these very dangerous times needs to have detailed knowledge.

When it came to domestic issues, Ms. Palin mainly relied on enthusiasm and humor, talking about hockey moms, soccer moms and Joe Sixpack almost as often as she used the word “maverick” to describe Mr. McCain or herself.

But she offered virtually no detail — beyond the Republican mantra of tax cuts — for how she and Mr. McCain would address the financial crisis or help Americans avoid foreclosure or what programs they would cut because of the country’s disastrous fiscal problems.

Ms. Palin’s primary tactic was simply to repeat the same thing over and over: John McCain is a maverick. So is she. To stay on that course, she had to indulge in some wildly circular logic: America does not want another Washington insider. They want Mr. McCain (who has been in Congress for nearly 26 years). Ms. Palin condemned Wall Street greed and said she and Mr. McCain would “demand” strict oversight. In virtually the next breath, she said government should “get out of the way” of American business.

There were occasional, disturbing flashes of the old, pre-campaign Sarah Palin. Asked about the causes of global warming, Ms. Palin suggested that man had some role — but she wasn’t saying how much.

In the end, the debate did not change the essential truth of Ms. Palin’s candidacy: Mr. McCain made a wildly irresponsible choice that shattered the image he created for himself as the honest, seasoned, experienced man of principle and judgment. It was either an act of incredible cynicism or appallingly bad judgment.

This morning, CNN is rotating a video of two of these .... you know... morons, talking about how because she sounds like a "fighting hockey mom", she's ready for the presidency, and John Roberts is dutifully reporting the meme that "everyone likes her", while Morning Joe is still trying mightily to get back on the Palin bandwagon. After all, endless war is good for his bosses at General Electric.

All I can say is that if what this country regards as leadership is this kind of willfully uninformed, phony, hypocritical, religiously crazy nitwit, just because she's pretty and its citizens can believe that she was winking at them and that means they have a chance to nail her, then this country deserves everything it's going to get when Alaska's answer to Maureen Dowd -- the girl who doesn't understand that she isn't the prettiest girl in high school anymore -- is running the country.

I only wish they weren't taking the rest of us into the abyss with them.

Joe Biden talks about the Republicans' dirty little secret

About 21 minutes in:

I heard that a Republican County Chairman right here in Michigan said that they're keeping a list of foreclosed homes, suggesting that if you've lost your home, you should also lose your vote. I have a different idea. I think that if you're worried about losing your home, you should vote for the guys who are going to help you keep it!

The story:

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed.

State election rules allow parties to assign “election challengers” to polls to monitor the election. In addition to observing the poll workers, these volunteers can challenge the eligibility of any voter provided they “have a good reason to believe” that the person is not eligible to vote. One allowable reason is that the person is not a “true resident of the city or township.”

The Michigan Republicans’ planned use of foreclosure lists is apparently an attempt to challenge ineligible voters as not being “true residents.”

Except that a foreclosure notice doesn't necessarily mean that the person isn't a resident. But go prove that when you show up to vote.

That's just one way the Republicans are trying to disenfranchise Democratic voters all over the country. Brad Friedman has been all over this for years, and if you want to know how they're trying to rig yet another election, make BradBlog a daily stop. Because if you think that elections should reflect the will of the people, and Republicans are doing what they can to make sure that only THEIR people can vote, the time to act is NOW.

This Is Why Joe Biden, Women's Sovereignty Over Their Own Bodies Edition

THIS is why I wanted Joe Biden for the #2 spot. Because no one in politics has ever explained the issue of abortion, religion, and the role of government, better than this:

Sing it, Joe!

THIS is why I was glad Joe Biden got the VP nod from Barack Obama:

Fightin' Joe. Yes, he is, as Karl Rove said, a big blowhard doofus. But he's OUR big blowhard doofus, and he knows how to tell it like it is. And after he and Obama are elected, we'll make him atone for the bankruptcy bill.`12

"Barack America"

I'm somewhat surprised that the media haven't latched onto Joe Biden's flub of Barack Obama's name yesterday when he called Obama "Barack America." At the time it was a =gasp= moment, but I think done correctly, there's a campaign theme in there.

Biden's speech yesterday was heavy on "The American Story" -- that both he and Obama are American Stories, even if those stories are very different. But they're stories of hardworking, hardscrabble people raising their kids to do Great Things. The knock on Obama, and what Republicans are trying to hammer, is He's Not Like Us -- as if John McCain, the son and grandson of admirals whose military education and position in the military was because of his father and grandfather and whose political career has been largely bankrolled by his heiress trophy wife, WAS "one of us". The number of houses fracas is the first crack in the McCain "regular guy" armor, and I'm sure there will be more. But between Obama's unfamiliar name, his unusual, globe-trotting background, and his extraordinary level of achievement, the Republicans have been able to frame him as "the other."

There are pitfalls to the "Barack America" meme. Too much and it's too arch and cutesy -- and susceptible to people turning it into a superhero comic. Too much and the "low information voters" (you know....morons) won't associate "Barack Obama" with "Barack America." But done right, I think it could be a powerful tool to fight the "He's not really American" sense that too many voters still have about him.

Well, that didn't take long

11:33 AM: "Morning Joe" runs the clip of Joe Biden from 1988 allegedly "plagiarizing" Neal Kinnock.

So are we going to play this way, then? Is everything from the 1980's fair game? OK, then...so are "Keating Five", bigamy, and we'll have to see what other goodies from John McCain's 1980's we can dig up.

Heeeere's......Joey!

As all of the media thought, and as how I'd been reduced to hoping, here is our Democratic ticket:

I think this is a good choice. Yes, Biden is a hack. Yes, he voted for the interests of the banking industry in voting for the bankruptcy bill that is causing homeowners even more problems in the face of foreclosure. Yes, he's a male, and the Hillarions are going to be furious today. But he's about the best choice Obama could make of the available options.

So what WOULD have been so bad about choosing Hillary Clinton? Two words: Bill Clinton. I had reached the point where I was beginning to think it wasn't such a bad idea after all, especially after names like Tim Kaine (too little experience, name too similar to the Republican nominee's, aggressively bad hair, too right-wing) and Evan Bayh (colorless, another right wing blue dog, unfortunate physical resemblance to John Edwards) and Chet Edwards (Who? Unfortunate last name) were bandied about. Yes, I think Wesley Clark would also have been a good choice, but whether it's fair or not, one poorly-worded, if accurate and out of context, quote, would have sunk the entire ticket. But while I think Hillary is smart enough to be able to handle being #2, and would have been a decent choice, Bill Clinton was so clearly not going to accept Barack Obama as the nominee, and it became so clear that it was all about "The Restoration of Bill" where he was concerned, that he, and he alone sunk Hillary's chances.

Biden can go out there and be the bad cop. He's smart, he's quick-witted, he's a master of the soundbite, and he's utterly shameless. And with Obama being the cool customer that he is, a little fire to Obama's ice isn't a bad thing.

And frankly, we owe him. Because if it weren't for Joe Biden, we'd be running against the self-appointed Saint of 9/11. And if it weren't for Joe Biden, the six words he used to singlehandedly end the presidential hopes of Rudy Giuliani wouldn't be so neatly translatable to "a noun, a verb, and POW." It isn't an accident that the mainstream media are now questioning whether Camp Grandpa Simpson has gone to the POW well once too often. So now Biden's his turn to find six new words to encapsulate the cravenness, the willful stupidity, the greed, and the corruption of John McCain.

And So, it's Biden....Barack Makes His Choice...and it's Good!

Onward and upward; I've got to say that this choice is encouraging to me. Biden has some fire in his belly and he is not afraid to use it. This is around the boldest choice I've seen Obama make in this thing.
I'll be interested to hear what everyone thinks of this pair.
I,for one, am relieved. The guy is vetted, he tells it like it is, he has experience, and he is fucking angry about the crap that's been coming down the pike from the Bush administration.

A good thing about sleeplessness and insanity is that you're up at all hours when these things come out. So much for the nifty cell phone Obama-text that I was supposed to get...oh well...better luck next announcement.

RIPCoco

First Andrew Sullivan, now David Brooks? What is the world coming to?

It isn't bad enough that I'm going to be unemployed in a week, now I have to find myself agreeing with not just Andrew Sullivan, but David Brooks as well?

Barack Obama has decided upon a vice-presidential running mate. And while I don’t know who it is as I write, for the good of the country, I hope he picked Joe Biden.

Biden’s weaknesses are on the surface. He has said a number of idiotic things over the years and, in the days following his selection, those snippets would be aired again and again.

But that won’t hurt all that much because voters are smart enough to forgive the genuine flaws of genuine people. And over the long haul, Biden provides what Obama needs:

...and for once I'm going to tell you to go read the rest.

It isn't that Biden is the dream candidate. He's a hack to end all hacks, and I can't get that image of him saying "I like you....you're the real deal" to Alberto Gonzales" out of my head. That he said it as part of a typically long-winded Biden diatribe that when read in full, is meant to disarm Gonzales through bonhomie while asking him tough questions is immagerial. It's that one line that we remember. He's an attention hog, he was entirely too chummy with the gasbags of the Sunday morning "news" shows, and then there's that disastrous bankruptcy bill, which now looks definitively like what it was -- an early attempt to keep lenders and credit card companies from holding the bag whenthe housing bubble burst.

But it's his very brash style that would be a terrific counterpoint to Obama's more measured, thoughtful, unflappability. Imagine a campaign where the #1 guy who's the cool customer you want doing the thinking in the crisis, and the #2 guy who's leaping around like a puppy. That image of Dan Quayle being introduced in 1984 just popped into your head, didn't it? Now imagine that the leaping puppy has 30 years of experience in not just navigating the hackery of Washington, but foreign policy cred behind him.

And now I just want to go back to bed. Because the fact that I linked to David Brooks without the word "idiot" appearing in its context is just too depressing.

Here's why I hope it's Biden

Yes, I said it.

I'm hoping Obama picks Joe Biden.

Yes, THAT Joe Biden. Senator MBNA. Senator "I like you...you're the real deal" -- said to none other than Alberto Gonzales at the latter's confirmation hearing.

I'm so ashamed.

And yet, Senator Joe Biden is the one singlehandledly responsible for the collapse of Rudy Giuliani's presidential hopes. And he did it with one devastating sentence: "Every sentence out of his mouth is a noun, a verb, and 9/11." He said it, Americans realized it was true, and that was the end of that.

We need Joe Biden because Barack Obama needs a "bad cop" with a gift for the one-liner.

These days, John McCain's campaign is using "He was a POW" as the answer to everything. He couldn't have cheated and listened to Rick Warren questioning Barack Obama while in the car because he was a POW. It doesn't matter that he cheated on his first wife and may have cheated on The Lovely Cindy because he was a POW. It doesn't matter that he was up to his eyeballs in the Keating Five scandal because he was a POW. He gets a free pass on everything because he was a POW. Now Eric Kleefeld at TPM Election Central tells us that the McCain campaign says that the fact that Senator Gigolo doesn't know how many houses he has doesn't matter....wait for it....because he was a POW!

Joe Biden, start working. We need a good one-sentence smackdown of this repeated and increasingly ridiculous use of the POW card.

Veepstakes

This weekend, John McCain has invited some prospective running mates to one of his eight homes, presumably for barbecue. Specifically, those being interviewed are the closeted governor of Florida, a card-carrying member of the Christofascist Zombie brigade who thinks joking about bombing Iran and about assassinating a black presidential nominee constitute humor, and Paulie Walnuts.

The Obama running mate hunt is just beginning, despite the Clinton campaign's attempt to rewrite history and spin the Florida/Michigan situation as being (pick one) Zimbabwe, Florida 2000, or Jim Crow, even though it was HER VERY OWN PEOPLE who helped put together, and voted for, the rules that put us into this mess.

I haven't got a freaking clue who Obama should pick, but I'm emphatically opposed to the so-called "dream ticket." It's clear that Barack Obama can't trust Hillary Clinton one bit, and there's something Shakespearean about the idea of a young president with the wife of a former president as his #2, with said former president lurking around the hallways. Obama's dilemma is in finding someone who can represent change along with him, but who can fill in some of the experience gaps. I'm kind of leaning towards Jim Webb on that front, for all that Webb isn't exactly a progressive dream candidate. But I could also live with this guy:

More of this speech here, here, and here.

UPDATE: Joltin' Joe smacks down Holy Joe and his Republican friends in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal today.

Joe Biden: "This administration's policy in the surge is a failure"

An uncharacteristically somber Joe Biden is just back from Iraq:

Note how Timmeh tries to put lipstick on the pig that is the administration's Iraq policy by parroting Captain Codpiece's line about Anbar Province. And Joltin' Joe shoots him right down (so to speak).

Let's see if he confronts Petraeus on the latter's inevitable positive spin this week.