Who will/should Obama pick as running mate?

Great Debates
641

I’m sorry, Sam, but it’s a bit late in this campaign for painting Obama as a Washington insider.

That would be Republicans in Congress who have such low ratings. As you may have noticed, the GOP ticket has at least one of those; the Dem ticket has zero.

If we fire up the Way-Back Machine, votes won’t be the only thing at issue. We might even get to explore the question of the time lag on the POW Integrity Effect: IOW, if being a former POW turns you into a man of integrity, but it doesn’t do so right away (cheating on first wife, Keating Five), just what is the lag time?

I think I could get a research grant out of this. :slight_smile:

Bush was governor of Texas. Cheney had been Bush Sr.'s Secretary of Defense, and CEO of Halliburton.

I’m not worried.

No, choosing this particular Senator had that effect. He could have chosen Senators from Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, Colorado…

And the ability of the veep candidate to swing his state for the ticket is highly overrated, as I mentioned earlier in this thread.

642

You didn’t provide a link, but if it’s the one I’m thinking about, it was about something almost trivially unimportant. Didn’t I already point that out to you in some other thread where you tried to use that Pit thread to establish your “fair and balanced” bona fides?

643

Okay, Ill bite, what do you think the approval rating for Democrats in congress is right now?

644

Oh, please. Since the Democrats have controlled Congress, its approval rating has dropped another ten points. People are sick of the lot of them.

The Keating 5 won’t hurt McCain. It’s old news, he didn’t do anything wrong, was absolved of everything, and shouldn’t even have been in the hearings. See the other Obama thread for details.

I didn’t say executive experience was a guarantee of good governance. The fact is, most of the people elected to the Presidency came from an executive background. John Kennedy was the last Senator to be elected. While it was McCain against Obama, the issue was nullified. But now that Obama has picked another Senator, McCain may pick an executive type and play that card. I don’t know whether or not it will make a big difference. But Obama has opened the door to that strategy.

True. I should have been more specific.

There are mixed results on that one.

645

Don’t forget, Biden drives home to Delaware every night or so. He doesn’t live inside the Beltway at all.

646

I’m not claiming to be completely fair and balanced. Obviously, all else being equal I’d support a Republican over a Democrat. In this case, Obama has some strengths that I think would be valuable, and McCain some weaknesses that I think would be detrimental. That makes it a much closer decision, and makes me inclined to be a little more dispassionate about this than I usually would be. But that doesn’t mean I won’t call people on outright hypocrisy or trying to hand-wave away serious issues about their candidate.

The thing is, I’m likely to be constantly going at Obama on this board, because that’s who almost everyone here is going to support. If I were hanging out on a right-wing board, I’d probably be the lone Obama defender and calling out the idiots trying to make hay out of his birth certificate or his middle name or the ‘closet muslim’ nonsense.

But if McCain says or does something stupid, I’ll be happy to call him on that too. I already told Diogenes that I tended to agree that the ‘cross in the sand’ story was probably a fish tale and not true.

647

I think Obama would have had trouble finding a better running mate. Biden complements Obama well. Biden is one of the few remaining legacy Democrats who “grew up” under Hubert Humphrey, whose name means little to most folks today, but means a lot to people my age and older, as a great champion of labor, civil rights, and other liberal causes. At the same time, he’s tough on national defense and very supportive of law enforcement domestically. He’s a very bright, articulate man with a lot of enthusiasm who never lost touch with his blue collar roots. To this day, his net worth is estimated to be between $100-$150 K, and he rides the train, not drives back and forth to Washington every day. His foreign policy experience actually considerably outweighs that of John McCain, plus Biden is the former head of the Judiciary Committee, and has a long history of working across the aisle. He is well liked even by his political opponents. In fact, he resembles a liberal version of John McCain in a lot of ways, except for one: he didn’t suddenly abandon all his principles in 2004 to campaign for Goerge W. Bush in order to position himself for a run for the Whitehouse in 2008. And the other thing in which he doesn’t resemble John McCain (and this was said by Pat Buchanan on MSNBC tonight) is that Biden is never mean, while McCain really can be. When a person is mean, it says a lot about themselves, I think.

So now we have fire in areas we had only ice, and double fire in the areas we already had fire. Obama is too cerebral to effectively attack opponents for most people, but Biden is great with a zinger - clever, witty, and to the point. When he takes a position, it’s generally well thought out. What he lacked in his own campaigns was money and message discipline, and by supplying both, the Obama campaign has made it easy for him. Either Biden is a great actor, or I saw genuine enthusiasm on his face this afternoon; he knows that if their team wins, he’s not just to sit around playing golf and attending foreign funerals. Obama may not always follow his advice, but he’ll always listen to it, and frequently incorporate it into his own plans. It won’t be quite an equal partnership, but Biden is not going to be sitting on the outside looking in, either. For someone who 7 months ago probably believed he had kissed his last shot at the presidency goodbye, he’s probably pretty excited at this opportunity.

Two questions: 1) Do you think he’d still commute to Delaware? 2) Is it legal for the VP to be the Secretary of State?

648

It took McCain about 8 seconds to put out an ad playing up Biden’s criticism of Obama when he was a candidate for President. The thing I find interesting about this is that would seem to kill any chance of McCain picking Romney to be his veep considering all the bad blood between them when they were running against each other. Now true, hypocrisy is nothing new in politics and so forth, but I think McCain would refrain from that kind of attack if Romney were the guy. I am now about 90% certain that Pawlenty has been chosen to be the veep.

649

Pawlenty would get devoured by Biden in the VP debate and he can’t deliver Minnesota. T-Paw looks like a lightweight and there’s actually less to him that meets the eye. He’s inoffensive to evangelicals, but he really brings nothing else to the ticket.

I think he wants to pick Ridge, but I think the party’s going to force him to choose Romney. A possible dark horse might be someone like K. B. Hutchinson if McCain wants to make a play for women.

650

The Republican base keeps floating Sarah Palin as a top pick for McCain, but man, she looks like a lightweight to me. A former beauty queen, she seems to have risen to the top of Alaska politics mainly on the power of her connections with the good ole’ boys, and she’s popular because she hunts and fishes and is a ‘tough woman’ in a state where that’s useful. But she’s got no education to speak of, no experience, no foreign policy credentials, and she’s in her first term as governor of a small (economically speaking) state.

But I keep hearing her name come up over and over again. I’ll bet now that Obama has picked an old white guy, the pressure on McCain to choose Palin and try to pick off some Hillary voters will be high.

Maybe Palin is brilliant, but on resume alone she looks like a terrible pick.

If McCain wasn’t so old, I’d say that he should go out and pick someone outside of politics - a Jack Welch type who could convince people that he knows how to fix the economy. But anyone like that of stature will be too old to run alongside McCain.

I actually have been thinking about Condoleeza Rice again. Russia’s shenanigans may have put her back in the running, since she’s an acknowledged expert on Russia, and she was one of Reagan’s advisors through the end of the cold war. If people think a new cold war might be starting up, she might be an attractive candidate. She also neutralizes the race issue somewhat and might attract women voters.

A few months ago I would have said that she’s too closely associated with Bush, but I’m not sure that’s a huge liability any more - with the Iraq war off the table as an issue, she might not be such a liability. The biggest problem with her is that neither she nor McCain are specialists in the economy, at a time when it looks like the biggest issue. So it probably won’t be Rice either.

It always seems to come back around to Romney. I don’t know if he would be a good pick or not - I have a hell of a time pigeonholing the guy, and figuring out what the electorate really thinks of him.

The dark horse is still Lieberman. McCain and he get along great, it would be a much more centrist ticket than Biden/Obama, and it would certainly signal that it’s not business as usual with McCain. Normally, I’d say that there’s no way Lieberman would be picked because the Republican base would have kittens, but the selection of Biden will bring the base out even more. They hate him for the way he went after the various Republican Supreme Court nominees.

651

Rice and Lieberman are both pro-choice. That makes them non-starters. Also, Rice is gay.

652

Oh, please!!! I would get down on my knees and beg McCain to pick Condi, if I thought it had the chance of making a difference.

Think of the times she’s stayed on vacation in a crisis (not just Georgia - remember Spamalot?). And remember how she talked about all those people getting slaughtered in Lebanon as “the birth pangs of a new Middle East”? Our own Madame DeFarge. :rolleyes:

She’d certainly neutralize at least one part of the race issue: people who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a black person would either throw in with Bob Barr, or stay home. She’d win Florida for Obama just on that. :slight_smile:

653

I’ve read rumors on Rice that have her playing the male field as well. Seriously, Pro-choice=strike 1. Black=strike 2. Female=strike 3 get to the bench. It won’t be Lieberman or Ridge or Rice. It will be Romney.

654

Palin has a nascent abuse-of-power problem brewing herself, so I doubt it’s going to be her.

655

I can’t agree that the Iraq war is no longer an issue in this election. It may not be the #1 issue anymore, but it’s still a big thing. Most Americans think the war was a mistake, the cost of the war is still flying sky-high and there is always the chance the violence will spike up from the current level of background carnage the media can barely be bothered to report on anymore. For me, it still is the #1 issue.

656

Then they might have a surprise coming. :smiley:

657

It isn’t that hard. Just look at his results during the primaries. The more the GOP electorate got to know him, and to recognize his desperate pandering to the righties for what it is, the less regard they had for him. We know him best here in MA, and he barely dares show his face here anymore - which may have something to do with his attempts in the primaries to re-brand himself as a Michigander.

Still, somebody’s gotta do it, and he does look handsome in a suit on TV. He did get much farther than Biden ever has, too.

658

I know what his problems are with the Republican base - he didn’t win the nomination because he’s Mormon, and because the Republican base didn’t trust his conservative bona fides. What I can’t figure out is what the general population would think of him. His ‘conservative problem’ is actually a benefit with the general public, but I have no idea what non-fundamentalist Americans think of Mormons. Here in Alberta, we’ve got plenty of them, and they’re generally well liked and respected. Very mainstream.

Romney was very popular in the nation when he rescued the Salt Lake City Olympics. Had he run for president around then, I think he would have won the nomination. But that was a long time ago, and events have changed the country.

659

A fan of simple, pat answers, aren’t you?

What part of “desperate pandering” …?

It ain’t his religion, no matter what the excuse-searchers would like. He’s disliked for a range of reasons, all inarguably relevant.

Even granting your premise that his lack of support is due to religious bigotry, Alberta still is not representative of the US.

Like Peter Ueberroth could have, right? :smiley: Come on now. That was a good thing, sure, but hardly enough to qualify for something that far up the ladder.

And Romney has changed too, hadn’t you noticed? :dubious:

660

A joke heard during the Republican primaries:

“I don’t like Romney’s policies.”

“Stick around. He’ll have some new ones in a couple of minutes.”