Tag: Joe Biden

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Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

Election 2008

John McCain has resurrected the old Republican playbook: Become a disqualifying factor in painting your opponent as unacceptable, and use smear on top of smear when you have nothing left to say about your own policies.

It works on gullible, uninformed voters who will support the “hot chick” or the “hero guy.” But for most of us, it doesn’t work any more. We’ve had eight years of these kinds of tactics. Karl Rove was one of the best at it. He could turn black into white and lies into “truth.”

Sarah Palin is an actor, and she played a credible politician in the vice-presidential debate. But I have seen a lot of actors in my day, and her performance was just that: a performance. If McCain and Palin are elected, the next four years will be like the last eight years. Only the names will have changed.

Palin is back on the stump, trying to tie Obama to former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. But being on a charity board with the guy is not the same as endorsing his conduct of 40 years ago, when Obama was 8 years old. The American people can surely figure that one out — except maybe some residents in East Tennessee, where any candidate who has a fish decal on the trunk of his car, wears a “WWJD” bracelet, and isn’t black is their kind of guy.

Joe M. Spitzer

Memphis

Imagine you’ve just received documents in the mail about your financial situation — scary information that your retirement funds are in danger, your savings and investments are not as robust as you’d been led to believe, and that soon your paycheck will be affected.

Two teams appear offering to help you figure this stuff out. One team talks a bit about the numbers. Some of what they say makes sense, some of it sounds half-baked, but at least you get the notion that these guys have experience with this kind of situation and have some sort of plan to fix it.

The other team gets all chummy and offers you a can of your favorite beer. They ask about your family and point out that they are “just folks” from down the street, same as you, no pretenses, no glib intellectualism. They give you a friendly squeeze on the shoulder. “We’re just regular guys, here to help,” they say. When pressed for specifics, they mutter some vague comment about how the other team has connections with terrorists.

You’d probably toss the second team out of your house because you’d recognize that their fake attempt at friendliness shows they have something to hide and nothing to offer.

Rodney Stells

Memphis

A Canadian friend recently asked me, “How could Americans possibly elect yet another president who wants to give more tax breaks to the richest 1 percent of your people?” 

I had to explain that a great number of factors come into play in American politics: Roughly 50 percent of Americans can’t read above a fifth-grade level, thereby making it hard for them to keep up with candidates’ records and points of view; evangelical Christians will vote for any candidate who says he opposes abortion, even if that candidate has murdered a bus load of nuns in front of 100 witnesses and openly advocates nuking Russia. I further pointed out that even Sarah Palin is far more knowledgeable about economics and foreign policy than 95 percent of Americans. 

Sadly, we have lost our lead as the nation with the highest living standard (that position is now held by Great Britain). We have lost our lead in science education and in respect around the world. Now our economy is failing due to eight years of rampant deregulation and lack of oversight from federal agencies. Most of this can be directly attributed to an uninformed electorate that bases decisions on emotions rather than reasoning. 

I recently read a letter to the editor decrying the awful “mess” of the Clinton years. I’d love a mess like that again: the highest budget surplus in history, the greatest prosperity in decades, and respect around the world that we will likely never experience again. 

Jim Brasfield

Collierville

With the election not far off, the political yard signs are starting to appear. As I drive around neighborhoods, I see signs reading “McCain/Palin” and “Obama/Cohen.” What happened to Joe Biden? Guess he’s not very well liked in the Mid-South.

Joe Mercer

Memphis

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Opinion Viewpoint

A Reassuring Choice

I saw another man dance with Joe Biden’s wife, Jill. It was almost three years ago, on the terrace of the sublime Villa d’Este on the shore of Italy’s stunning Lake Como, and Biden watched, smiling broadly and sometimes laughing, as the man gracefully moved Jill around the dance floor. It was late, and the guests still there looked on keenly because Jill Biden’s dancing partner was very good-looking and very famous. He was John McCain.

I tell this story to suggest that if anyone — including, of course, Barack Obama — thinks that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is going to play the usual role given to a vice presidential candidate, that of hatchet man, then the wrong man has been chosen. Biden is capable of the occasional gaffe, the sentence without end, the piquant but (literally) politically incorrect statement such as the one he made during the primary campaign — Obama is “not yet ready” to be president — but he has the essential decency that once was commonplace in Washington and now, alas, is taken for weakness and lack of proper fervor. Joe Biden is a gentleman.

In choosing Biden, Obama reached into the very heart of the Washington establishment — especially its foreign policy wing. In his many years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, both as a member and as chairman, Biden has come to know just about all the players. He has been at it so long — elected senator at the ridiculous age of 29 — that then-Captain John McCain (U.S. Navy) was his military aide on some foreign trips. I applaud the choice of Biden, but the one thing he does not represent is change.

In fact, Biden represents the foreign policy consensus that Obama, and especially his followers, opposed — and in the latter case, abhorred. Biden voted for the Iraq war. He based his position on the received wisdom of that time, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and needed to be taken out. Biden later recanted, said he made a mistake. But his mistake, he had to add, was predicated on the assumption that President Bush would not rush to war. That was his second mistake.

Yet if Biden was wrong on Iraq, he has been right on so much else — including that military force had to be used in the former Yugoslavia to end ethnic cleansing. He has been right, too, about the dangers of nuclear proliferation — a dull topic of merely life-or-death importance. Over the years, he has been loyal, to his party and to his president, even when that president was as irresponsible as Bill Clinton.

Biden’s selection represents an implied admission by Obama that he lacks what Biden has: foreign policy credentials. In that sense, the Delaware senator does not make the ticket whole. Instead, he calls attention to what it lacks.

A vice president’s only meaningful constitutional obligation is to succeed the president in the event of death or incapacitation. Biden can do that. But his foreign policy experience is almost beside the point. A president has an entire staff dedicated to national security and a national security adviser who, depending on the president, can have more power than the secretary of state.

No, Biden was chosen because, in the end, he satisfied Obama’s apparent desire, if not need, to reassure those who wonder about his youth, his race, his manner, his peripatetic childhood: I’m safe. I’m prudent. I’m thoughtful. I was president of the Harvard Law Review, for crying out loud. On the stump, Obama did not need someone like himself. He felt the need for someone more rooted.

For Obama, the risk in choosing Biden is that he will, sooner or later, throw this highly disciplined campaign off-message. Biden has substituted loquaciousness for the conventional and more colorful weaknesses of politicians. To quote something I once wrote, his mouth is his Achilles’ heel.

In response to that column, Biden called and left a message. He thanked me for the column … he needed to be told the truth … it was good for him … hard to hear, but in the end the sort of thing he needed to know … of course, he had his reasons for going on so long — this was during the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito — since he had things to say … points to make … but, yes, I was right, and he went on too long and he had to do something about that and it was good of me to point it out … Beep! The machine cut him off.

Gotta love someone like that.