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Wednesday, August 20, 2008
One Joe, yes. Please. But not two.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Please, make it Joe.
Make Joe the VP.
Joe Lieberman, the Independent U.S. Senator from Connecticut who caucuses with the Democrats, came to Atlanta Monday with the Republicans’ presidential candidate for a fund-raiser. The speculation — and concern — was that John McCain was shopping Lieberman as his running mate. If so, it didn’t go over well. McCain’s base is growing comfortable with him as the nominee, reassured by his aggressiveness in taking on the post-European global citizen, Barack Obama, and by his sterling performance in the Saddleback Church conversations with Pastor Rick Warren.
Don’t blow it now. Joe, no. Surveying the entire Republican Party and concluding that there’s nobody there who’d be a suitable vice president is a message McCain doesn’t want to send.
Ah, but there is a Joe, a fine Joe, who would be a spectacular choice for vice president. That’d be Joe Biden, U.S. Senator, Deleware, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
There’d be great tension, of course. Both are talkers. Talk and talk and talk. Morning and night. Vapid, empty, meaningless, meandering rhetoric. With Obama and Biden, America could revive the presidency of Warren Harding.
About him it was said by Georgia native William G. McAdoo, Treasury Secretary under Woodrow Wilson, that his campaign speeches were “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.”
And arrogance? If there’s a politician in America who matches Obama for arrogance, it’s Joe Biden. Instead of the annual Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn, we could have an Arrogance Face-Off at 20 paces. This is a tough one. My money in that contest is on Biden. He’s far more experienced.
But with a little seasoning, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” could be the Michael Phelps of political arrogance.
Oh, the suspense of it all. Who will it be? Who is the other one we’ve been waiting for?
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