Should Joe Biden Step Down as VP?

Version 0.2

Should Joe Biden Step Down as VP?

This is actually based on a comment I added to an article about replacing Joe Biden as VP on Huffington Post. My own answer is yes, he should step aside, mainly for the reasons below, most of which were not addressed in the article.

This article raised the political considerat­ions and then ignored the most important factor--th­e neo-GOP nominee. The best V-P pick to balance the Democratic ticket will crucially depend on who President Obama is running against. I actually like Joe Biden and don't think he's done a bad job, but he is fundamenta­lly too old to represent the future of the Democratic Party. Actually, I'm sure it was another metric of Dubya's fundamenta­l incompeten­ce that he didn't dump the big dick Cheney in 2004.

I actually think the most powerful V-P pick would be a progressive or even liberal candidate--from the OLD Republican Party. Someone who switched to the Democratic Party precisely because the GOP is no more. The dominant rightwing clique of the neo-GOP is actually strongly controlled by the Reagan Republican­s who used to be Southern Democrats. Unfortunately, I can't think of any examples of a prominent Republican who has switched to the Democratic Party. The neo-GOP party discipline puts Lenin's Bolsheviks to shame.

By the way, I don't think Reagan deserves much of the credit (or blame) for remaking the GOP into the far rightwing neo-GOP. That was mostly a negative reaction to LBJ's civil rights legislation, and Reagan was just an excuse that the Southern Democrats were waiting for. Almost any excuse would have done, and it was more like a supersaturated gas that suddenly condensed from gaseous Southern Democrats into Reagan Republicans. When I arrived in Texas in the mid-70s, there hadn't been a Republican governor of Texas since Reconstruction, but since the cloudburst of Reagan Republicans, there are no prominent Democrats in any statewide office in Texas.

Unfortunat­ely, as much as I respect President Obama, I think he lacks Reagan's skills as a propagandist and figurehead, and that is apparently what it takes to motivate Americans these days. Or maybe it's just the superior power of negative motivations? The Southern Democrats REALLY hated LBJ's civil rights laws... Maybe Obama could motivate a large migration of old progressive GOP voters into the Democratic Party, but I haven't seen any hint of such a trend.

In conclusion, I repeat that I think it's time for Joe Biden to step down as V-P. Though the original article dismissed him as regards State, I think he could and probably would do a good job there. However, I think that Clinton has done quite well there and he would probably be overshadowed for just that reason, barring some massive success such as peace in Israel.

Return of the native and new 2008 speculations

Over two years since I've commented here, so I think I should start with a bit of contextualizing and history. This blog actually originated in what has to be described as a "manual blog" I was preparing at http://shanenj.tripod.com/antibush.html as a kind of sporadic ongoing commentary on the political news of the day. That actually started early in 2001 when I'd never heard of the idea of a blog, though I think Blogger probably existed at that time. Great minds think alike? Or maybe I'd heard something about such an idea and just forgotten about my source for the idea? I often wonder... Anyway, I was just doing it by hand, which is a lot of nuisance for the bookkeeping and mechanics and the especially painful archiving of older posts when it got too large. No provision for visitor comments. People could send email comments, but if anyone was reading it, they mostly didn't say anything... At some point I heard about Blogger and I tried to integrate it into my existing methods, which wasn't too easy.

After a few years, there was the disgusting ultimate-mud-slinging election of 2004, and I was pretty much bummed out with the whole thing. I still think the yet-to-be-revealed truth is that Kerry was Karl Rove's hand-picked-in-secret nominee, and that the election was truly determined by the MSM attack on Howard Dean over the bogus issue of "the scream". Dubya has certainly committed a basically uncountable number of worse gaffs--if they only felt like giving him equal treatment, but in Dubya's case they just claim it makes him the guy "you" want to have a beer with--except for the little detail that Dubya doesn't drink bear with anyone in this revised life... Anyway, In 2000 Rove's neo-GOP drummed up support for Dubya as a 'name-brand' candidate who could (but didn't actually) beat Al Gore, and in 2004, the neo-GOP picked Kerry as a Democratic candidate that Dubya could beat--and I'm still not sure about that, given the games they played in that election, mostly with disenfranchising Democratic voters. Another one that may get revealed when the data is finally unraveled...

Anyway, after the election, about the only political part of my website that remained active was the anti-Dubya book review section, which has grown into quite a large file over the years, even though I'm not reading so many politically relevant books now. My general perspective remains pretty much unchanged, which is that America is on the way down... I keep seeing more and more evidence in the most surprising places. I think the big economic disaster will be triggered by a devaluation of the American dollar responding to the balance of trade and deficit spending. So the latest surprising place was in a Japanese history book a few days ago, where I ran across a very interesting graph of the American balance of trade with respect to England in the period before the American Revolution... It all fits together. Like we used to say in the Rice history department, "The only lesson you learn from history is that no one learns any lessons from history."

At this point it looks like America was sort of jostled out of it's nap for the election of 2006, and Dubya Bush's legacy of miserable failure is coming unraveled at every seam. However, I think it's just too little, too late...

Today's proximate cause of commenting was a comment I wrote yesterday for another venue. The topic of that discussion was the probably Democratic nominee for 2008. Slightly polished here...

I'm not so much against Hillary Clinton as a moderate Democratic professional politician as I am against her as a nepotistic family candidate. That's 95% of how we got Dubya in the last place. Dubya Bush should have been laughed out of any serious political race on his own track record of miserable failures and amazing incompetence. Yes, her qualifications are vastly superior to Dubya's, and Bill Clinton deliberately picked her, while Dubya is just a genetic accident of the worst sort. However, the bottom line is that she wouldn't be considered such a strong contender if she wasn't "a Clinton", and I think that family is the kind of criteria you can reasonably use for picking figurehead kings and queens, but that nepotism has no place in what is supposed to be a rational democratically elected representative republican form of government. (Did I include all the proper buzzwords there?)

However, I admit that I would certainly vote for any of the current Democratic candidates, even including Hillary, against any of the Republicans who have declared their intention to run. I kind of hope they manage to nominate that flip-flopper double-speaking McCain, but I fantasize about Cheney as the candidate. Heck, let's dream big. Imagine Rove coming out of the closet and actually pretending to be a real politician and somehow getting the nomination by calling in all his chips. That would be a rout to end all routs. (On the other hand, Dubya should have been routed in 2000 *AND* 2004... You only have to fool 30% of the voters on Election Day these days.)

The way things are looking now, the Republicans are going to be desperately fishing for any candidate on the negative litmus test "Can he beat Al Gore?" Well, that strategy didn't even work in 2000, though the SCOTUS kicked dirt in everyone's faces and shoved Dubya into the White House.