{"id":325,"date":"2008-08-23T10:29:23","date_gmt":"2008-08-23T10:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=325"},"modified":"2008-08-23T10:29:23","modified_gmt":"2008-08-23T10:29:23","slug":"bad_call","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=325","title":{"rendered":"Bad call."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n&#8220;A Vice-President cannot help you, he can only hurt you.&#8221;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n-Richard Nixon\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThis was a Fize.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n(more past the link, or beneath the jump)\n<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>\nPicking Joe Biden as the VP is the first seriously wrong move I&#8217;ve seen Team Obama make this entire cycle.  At one stroke, it undercuts a massive chunk of the Obama theme and opens new lines of attack:\n<\/p>\n<p>\n1) It reinforces the idea that Obama needs the Wise Old Men of Washington to provide him with foreign policy support.  On the one hand, sure Biden brings all this &#8220;experience&#8221; to the table, but on the other hand, having somebody around who first ran for President twenty years ago is hardly a good way to sell the topic of change.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n2) Biden *did* run for President 20 years ago, where he was famously dinged for ripping off material from a famously inept Labour Party leader in the UK.  Sure, &#8220;plagarism&#8221; starts to sound like &#8220;whatever&#8221; to anyone outside academia for more than a few years, but come on, he&#8217;s from Delaware, where every bloody corporation on Earth is registered and where the politics is famously fever-swamp in caliber.  You don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s going to be all manner of shady stuff to be dredged up?  Doesn&#8217;t even have to be true, just plausible, and there&#8217;s a LOT of plausibility in Delaware.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n3) Sure, he punches back, but he also swings wide.  Not a great fit for a team defined by their message discipline to this point.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n4) The fact that he&#8217;s been in the Senate for THIRTY-SIX YEARS sort of puts an end to the sub rosa argument that maybe McCain&#8217;s a little too old for this shit. Good luck running him for President in 2016 when he&#8217;s older than McCain is now.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n5) If you want to get 60 Democratic votes in the Senate, taking one out to be VP may not be the smartest way to go.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI can hear the cries now, &#8220;but who then, smartass?&#8221;  I think Kaine would have been a good pick.  I think Sebilus would have been just fine, although I can see how somebody might think that ticket would be a little too &#8220;historical&#8221; for some parts of the country.  I think a real wild card would have been Mike Bloomberg in NYC, who is a Republican in name only but who would have triggered the Magical Unity Pony effect in the press for a while and maybe even undermined the Guiliani strategy.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nBut Biden is a Fize.  For those of you not from the South, this translates to &#8220;Fize Obama, I wouldn&#8217;t&#8217;ve picked that donkey,&#8221;\n<\/p>\n<p>\nIf they lose it, I think history may record they lost it today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;A Vice-President cannot help you, he can only hurt you.&#8221; -Richard Nixon This was a Fize. (more past the link, or beneath the jump)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}