Joe Biden's Foreign Policy
The rap against Obama — that he's all talk, no policy — applies twice over to Joe Biden. A prominent grandstander on Bosnia and Kosovo, Biden has vigorously worked the Darfur 'genocide' sob-story and most recently the Georgia conflict. He's a crisis chaser with a dependable record of being wrong. While it's true that he's now anti Iraq war, when it counted he voted to let the White House have its way. That's the cloth he's cut from: he always goes along with a majority consensus on critical decisions — when courageous dissent is called for he's nowhere to be found. Supposedly Biden will deflect charges of Obama's inexperience regarding national security issues. Perhaps just as likely he will give progressives pause.
Posted by George Kenney on August 23, 2008 7:33 AM 
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Comments
This seems like a very stupid choice on Obama's part, considering Biden has so many (self inflicted) vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, this should make it clear to even the most self delusional Obama fans that he is not an agent of change, is not anti-war, does not represent an alternative to U.S imperial politics — in short that he is much more of the same. I will not be voting for the Obama/Biden ticket, despite the fact that McCain is "The most dangerous man in America."
Posted by: John D. Bartram | August 23, 2008 8:51 AM
It was clear that Obama had no new ideas in foreign policy anyway, and adding Biden to the mix hardly changes that. We can count on a welcome stylistic change from the bombastic blundering of Bush/Cheney/Rice to the more nuanced blundering of the Clinton years, but not much more.
There's an old saw that Social Security is the 3rd rail of American politics, but attacking SS is safe compared to opposing American imperial exceptionalism and billions more for "defense". I think both concepts are safe for the next 4 years.
Posted by: Democracy Lover
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August 23, 2008 8:55 AM
Absolutely... all of the issues where we need to make the most pressing changes the fastest — our national relationship to credit, and to a financial sector controlled by predatory wild-west market-fundamentalists with zero concern for collective social issues — are pretty much rendered untouchable by the selection of Biden.
Few things are more important to our national future than ending the American 'culture of profligacy' (as per Andrew Bacevich) and credit-dependence, to say nothing of our need to fundamentally change our hyper-consumerist culture.
And while I realize that no one was ever going to deal with the problem of unhinged, unregulated predatory capitalism in a straight-up fashion, the selection of Biden basically ties a couple more lead weights to that realization, and as it sinks deeper into the sea I'm now nearly certain that no one's even going to approach these issues at all, besides superficially.
Which is a damn shame, and everybody's loss.
Same old story, though... certainly nothing new to see here...
Posted by: greg korn | August 23, 2008 3:15 PM